James Baldwin Essay Prize

Our inaugural James Baldwin Essay Prize for a research essay by an advanced Stanford PhD student in Humanities, Arts or Social Sciences goes to Radhika Koul for Postcolonial Comparisons Between France and Kashmir: A Study in Method.  Koul received her BA in Literature from Yale, then spent two years as a Teach for India fellow, and is currently a fifth-year PhD student in Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, where her work focuses on aesthetic thought in French neoclassicism and medieval Kashmir.  In her prize-winning essay, Koul juxtaposes the literary-philosophical worlds of medieval Kashmir and seventeenth-century France, using each to gain perspective on the other’s representations of the relationship between the divine and the mundane.  Koul’s guiding aim in this juxtaposition is to “provincialize Europe.”  She writes that by giving equal weight to thinkers “regardless of the dynamics of power that have shaped our world, by lifting them in the zodiac of one’s own wit, free from the constraints of institutional proprieties that are only too recent in the history of knowledge, one takes the first step in reversing colonial priorities and pursuing alternative ancestries for humanistic study.”