Kenyon - IITM Writing Workshop Indian Institute of Technology Madras (December 14 - 18, 2020)
A collaborative endeavour between Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, USA & IIT Madras, Chennai, India
A five day Writing Workshop offered by scholars who teach writing at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, USA and faculty from IIT Madras, Chennai, India who are creative writers but specialize in variegated fields such as engineering, biotechnology, humanities and social sciences.
Date: December 14 – 18, 2020 (Inaugural Lecture and Inauguration on Dec 13, 2020)
Genre: Fiction – 15 seats Non-fiction – 15 seats Science Writing (Group I) – 15 seats Science Writing (Group II) – 15 seats
Who can apply - young faculty, aspiring writers, college students, other interested individuals
Application: Click here for application
Deadlines: 1. Submission of application - November 20, 2020 2. Intimation of acceptance – November 27, 2020
Course Fee: ₹ 1000/- for B.Tech. M.A., M.S., & M.Tech. (Only IIT Madras Students) ₹ 2000/- for Ph.D., (Only IIT Madras Students) ₹ 2000/- for Students from other IITs and other Colleges ₹ 3000/- faculty, professionals and other interested people (Course fee covers Registration, Study Materials, Tutorials and Faculty Lectures for all five days)
Coordinators from Kenyon College: Prof. Wendy Singer Roy T Wortman Professor of History and South Asian Studies Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, USA Email: [email protected]
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Prof. David H. Lynn Special Assistant to the President Professor of English Editor Emeritus of the Kenyon Review Kenyon College, Treleaven House 201 Gambier, Ohio, USA Email: [email protected]
Organising Committee:
Prof. Wendy Singer (Coordinator) Roy T Wortman Professor of History and South Asian Studies Kenyon College Gambier, Ohio, USA Email: [email protected]
Prof. David H. Lynn (Coordinator) Special Assistant to the President Professor of English Editor Emeritus of the Kenyon Review Kenyon College, Treleaven House 201 Gambier, Ohio, USA
Dr. Sudarsan Padmanabhan (Coordinator) Associate Professor Department of Humanities and Social Sciences IIT Madras, Chennai, India Email: [email protected]
Prof. Sriramkumar L (Coordinator) Professor Department of Physics IIT Madras, Chennai, India Email: [email protected]
Dr. Kaamya Sharma Assistant Professor Department of Humanities and Social Sciences IIT Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India Email: [email protected]
Ms. Suguna P V Technical Team Web designer, Documentations, Outreach Dept. of HSS, IIT Madras, Chennai, India
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Email: [email protected]
Mr. Sasikumar D Technical Team Designer, Documentations, Outreach Dept. of HSS, IIT Madras, Chennai, India Email: [email protected]
Teaching Fellows:
Mr. Sam Zafris Writer Columbus, Ohio, USA
Dr. Kaamya Sharma Assistant Professor Department of Humanities and Social Sciences IIT Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India Email: [email protected]
Ms. Smruthi Bala Kannan Research Scholar Department of Education Rutgers University New Jersey, USA Email: [email protected]
Teaching Assistants:
Ms. Shweta Venkatesh Alumnus Department of Humanities and Social Sciences IIT Madras, Chennai, India Email: [email protected]
Ms. Malayaja Chutani Research Scholar Department of Physics, IIT Madras, Chennai, India Email: [email protected]
Mr. Ragavendra H V Research Scholar Department of Physics, IIT Madras, Chennai, India Email: [email protected]
Course Fee: ₹ 1000/- for B. Tech., M. A., M. S., & M. Tech., (IIT Madras Students) ₹ 2000/- for Ph.D., (IIT Madras Students) ₹ 2000/- for Students from other IITs and other Colleges ₹ 3000/- faculty, professionals and other interested people (Course fee covers Registration, Study Materials and Faculty Lectures for all five days.) 6
Supported by: Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, USA Kenyon Review, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, USA Office of Dean Students, IIT Madras, Chennai, India Office of Alumni & Corporate Relations, IIT Madras, Chennai, India Office of Global Engagement, IIT Madras, Chennai, India Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, Chennai, India Department of Physics, IIT Madras, Chennai, India
Coordinators from Kenyon College: Wendy Singer is an historian of South Asia, whose research focuses, primarily, on the period after 1947. Her current projects connect the history of the anti-colonial movement to the development of the post-independence state. At the moment she is finishing an essay, “Women in the State: Elected women and the Challenge of Politics in the 1950s,” which is part of a collaborative project on Feminism and Nationalism in India. A highlight of this collaboration was a conference in September of 2018 at Cambridge University. In addition, she is co-editing a volume on India’s multi-language policies and particularly the variation in language politics across states. Finally, and connectedly, she is writing a monograph on the history of "Reservations," India policy, somewhat like affirmative action, that provides designated seats in Parliament, state legislatures and other institutions for under-represented groups. The research for this book was sponsored by a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Grant. All three projects point to the organic and changing nature of Indian democracy, which was designed to emphasize its inclusiveness of various constituents and stake-holders within Indian society and, in so doing, provide potential lessons for the rest of the world.
David Lynn is Editor Emeritus of the Kenyon Review, an international journal of literature, culture, and the arts, which he edited from 1994-2020. He is also professor of English and Special Assistant to the President of Kenyon College. In 1990, he founded the KR Young Writers Program and, in 1997, the KR Writers Workshop. His collection, Children of God: New and Selected Stories, appeared in 2019. One of its stories, "Divergence," won an O. Henry Award. David 7
Lynn is also the author of Wrestling with Gabriel, a novel, and two earlier collections of stories, Year of Fire and Fortune Telling, as well as a critical study, The Hero's Tale: Narrators in the Early Modern Novel. His stories and essays have appeared in magazines and journals in America, England, India, and Australia. David Lynn lives in Gambier, Ohio with his wife, Wendy Singer, a distinguished historian of India.
About the Faculty conducting the Writing Workshop:
In addition to many short stories, Nancy Zafris has published four books of fiction: The People I Know (U of Georgia Press), winner of the Flannery O’Connor award for short fiction and the Ohioana Library Association award for best book of fiction; The Metal Shredders (Blue Hen/Penguin Putnam), a NY Times Notable book, Lucky Strike (Unbridled Books), and Home Jar (U of Northern Illinois), a collection of short stories named one of the year’s ten best books by Minneapolis Star Tribune. She has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts grants (their maximum) and also served as a panelist for them. She was the fiction editor of the Kenyon Review for nine years, followed by eight years as series editor of the Flannery O’Connor award for short fiction. She has recently completed a new book as well as a young adult novel.
Chris Gillen is Professor of Biology at Kenyon College. His research group has received funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health to study salt and water balance in insect model systems using molecular and physiological approaches. He is the author of two books: Reading Primary Literature (Pearson, 2007) and Hidden Mechanics of Exercise: Molecules that Move Us (Harvard University Press, 2014). Gillen directs the Science and Nature Writing program at Kenyon. He has developed and taught writing workshops for a variety of audiences, including the Kenyon Review Young Science Writers workshop for high school students. He is a winner of Kenyon's Trustee Teaching Excellence Award and the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology’s M. Patricia Morse Award for Excellence and Innovation in Science Education.
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Geeta Kothari is the nonfiction editor of The Kenyon Review. She is a two-time recipient of the fellowship in literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the editor of ‘Did My Mama Like to Dance?’ and Other Stories about Mothers and Daughters. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including the Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, Fourth Genre, and Best American Essays. In 2004, she received the David and Tina Bellet Award for Teaching Excellence. In addition to teaching in the undergraduate curriculum, Geeta Kothari also directs the Writing Center.
Robert Mauck is a Professor of Biology at Kenyon College and former Director of the Bowdoin College Scientific Station at Kent Island. His research pursues questions of life-history evolution, physiological ecology, climate change, and behavior in a long-lived seabird, Leach's storm-petrel, a species he has studied for nearly 30 years. Author of numerous scientific papers, he has taught Science Writing at Kenyon College and is a past winner of Kenyon's Trustee Teaching Excellence Award. He had a full life before joining academia, during which his writing appeared in National Wildlife Magazine, the Anchorage Daily News.
Yutan Getzler earned a doctorate from Cornell University in 2004. Since that time, his scholarship at Kenyon College has focused on homogeneous catalysis and sustainable polymer chemistry. His work at Kenyon has been supported by the ACS- PRF, published in Nature Reviews Materials, Macromolecules, and Acta Crystallographica, and presented at ACS meetings and the Polymers Gordon Research Conference.
Geetha Iyer received an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University in 2014. Her publications include work in Orion, Gulf Coast, The Account, The Massachusetts Review, Electric Literature, and National Geographic. Her writing has received the O. Henry Award, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Calvino Prize, and the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize. She is the 2020-2022 Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellow at Kenyon College,
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where she writes and teaches about intersections between the sciences and the arts through ecocritical and postcolonial lenses.
Arunn Narasimhan received his Ph.D. in Heat Transfer with minors in Manufacturing and Biology in 2002 from the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Southern Methodist University, USA. Before joining IIT Madras, he was a staff engineer in the Micro- lithography division of FSI International, Allen, TX, USA.
Arunn Narasimhan has written and published two social novels in Tamil language. America Desi (2015), his first novel, recounts the coming of age experience for a boy from the deeply conservative South Indian small town travelling to the USA for the first time pursuing higher studies. His second novel Achchuvai Perinum (2016) ruminates on and marshals the theme of past lovers now in separate relationships kindling their old flame. He has also written popular science books in Tamil language. The book Nano introduces Nano-technology in a themed essay collection format while the book Do Aliens Exist expounds the scientific search for extra- terrestrial intelligence elaborating on technical themes like Fermi’s paradox, Kardashov scale and SETI in simple language. Two other essay collections What is the Shape of the Earth and Why do Toucans have Large Beaks traverse the terrain of science in all its glory and candour.
He has also written elaborate expository essays for online magazine on Carnatic and classical music and has contributed essays to newspapers like The Hindu. He has been a music critic of the December Madras Music Season for newspapers including The Hindu and Dinamalar for the past few years. He was a Carnatic music guitarist of the fusion band Srishti.
He has also given several invited bi-lingual talks popularising science at various universities and schools and has appeared on TV shows. His other hobbies include reading, world movies and western classical music.
Email: [email protected] Web: https://home.iitm.ac.in/arunn Personal (Tamil): https://arunn.me
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