Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was a literary scholar and a major figure in postcolonial theory. She earned her doctorate at the University of Iowa under Paul de Man and later taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York. She was also a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She became known in part for her translation of and critical introduction to Jacques Derrida’s *Of Grammatology* (1976), as well as for the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985/1988). Her other works include *In Other Worlds* (1987), *A Critique of Postcolonial Reason* (1999), and *An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization* (2012).