Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is university professor in the humanities at Columbia University and the author of many books, including The Post-Colonial Critic (1990), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Nationalism and the Imagination (2010), Harlem (2012), and Readings (2014), the last three also published by Seagull Books. She has also translated works by Mahasweta Devi. Spivak was awarded the 2012 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for being ‘a critical theorist and educator speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in relation to the globalized world’. In 2013, she received the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian award.