PANJABI Kavita

kavip@vsnl.com
digital@cal.vsnl.net.in

Head of the Department of Comparative Literature in Jadavpur University, Calcutta, Kavita specializes in the field of women’s studies and Latin American literatures and is currently active in the women’s movement in India. She recently joined the ARENA Council of Fellows and is currently involved in its South Asian Women’s Oral History Project. She has made numerous presentations on violence against women, the Gujarat experience, women and militarism and other gender issues. Amongst her published articles is a contribution to the volume Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. A founding member of the Forum for Communal Harmony set up in Calcutta after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Kavita worked with riot-affected families in the Tangra area and has also been with the Pakistan India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy since 1998. As a member of the Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS), she served on its Executive Committee from 1996-1998. Kavita received a Sephis Fellowship from 1998-2000 for her work on an oral narratives project on women’s participation in the Tebhaga peasant movement in Bengal in the late forties. In 2002 she was part of the three member team that visited Gujarat and compiled The Next Generation : In the Wake of the Genocide  - A Report on the Impact of the Gujarat Programme on Children and the Young.

Kavita is currently a trustee of the Aman Charitable Trust, a national organization that focuses on research and activism for mitigating violence in society, works in the Academic Committee of the School of Women’s Studies, and teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University.