Susan Visvanathan

Susan Visvanathan is the author of Christians of Kerala (1993), Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism (2007) and The Children of Nature (2010). She has published essays in various journals, the earliest of which was ‘Reconstrutions of the Past among the Syrian Christians of Kerala’ in Contributions to Indian Sociology (1986). Prof. Visvanathan was Chairperson of Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University (2009–2011) and Teacher-in-Charge of Department of Sociology, Hindu College (1992–1997). She has taught Sociology for thirty-eight years, of which twenty-five years were spent at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she had the privilege of working with doctoral students. She retired from Jawaharlal Nehru University, on 9 March 2022. Susan Visvanathan has edited Structure and Transformation (2001), Chronology and Event (edited with Vineeta Menon) (2019), Art, Politics, Symbols and Religion (2019), Structure, Innovation and Adaptation (2019). She collaborated with the art historian, Geeti Sen, and edited two volumes of the India International Quarterly titled Kerala (1995) and Women and the Family (1997). Susan Visvanathan is a well-known writer of literary fiction who has been included in Bruce King's Rewriting India: Eight Writers (2014). Her first novella, a collection of integrated short stories, titled Something Barely Remembered (2000) was published by Flamingo and India Ink, and was one of the 6 nominees for the Commonwealth Award, UK. It is now a text book for English Literature students in the 200 colleges of the Mahatma Gandhi
University, Kottayam, Kerala. Prof. Visvanathan was Visiting Professor to the Maison des Sciences de l’homme, Paris (2004) and to Universite Paris 13 (2011). She was Charles Wallace Fellow at Ethnomusicology and Anthropology Department in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1997. Prof. Visvanathan was Professional Excellence Award Fellow at Budapest, Central European University in 2018.