Dilip P. Gaonkar
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar is a Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Director of Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University. He is also Executive Director of the Center for Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly research network concerned with global issues based in Chicago and New York. Gaonkar was closely associated with the influential journal Public Culture from the early 1990s, serving in various editorial capacities: associate editor, executive editor, and editor.
Gaonkar has two main sets of scholarly interests: rhetoric as an intellectual tradition, both its ancient roots and its contemporary mutations; and global modernities and their impact on the political. He has published numerous essays on rhetoric, including "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science" that was published along with ten critical responses to the essay in a book, Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, edited by Alan G. Gross and William Keith. Gaonkar has edited a series books on global cultural politics: Globaizing American Studies, Alternative Modernities, and Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies. He has also edited several special issues of journals: “Laclau's On Populist Reason”, “Cultures of Democracy”, “Commitments in a Post-Foundational World”, “Technologies of Public Persuasion”, and “New Imaginaries”. He is currently working on two edited volumes: Oxford Handbook on Rhetoric and Political Theory and Distribution of the Sensible: Ranciere on Politics and Aesthetics. Gaonkar is also co-writing on a book on populism with Charles Taylor and Craig Calhoun.
Dilip Gaonkar hails from the Ankola region in Karwar district. He is a grandson of SAPA. Gaonkar and Venkanna H. Naik. Gaonkar is married to Sally Ewing, a writer and former Associate Dean of Advising and Student Affairs at Northwestern University's School of Communication.
Academic life
Goankar's doctoral thesis at the University of Pittsburgh was titled Aspects of sophistic pedagogy.His prior degrees include M.A. in Theatre, M.A. in Political Science and B.A. in Politics and Philosophy. Before joining Northwestern, Gaonkar was in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois in 1989 and then at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.