The Leonard Lief Library and English Department presents: Archaeology of Babel:  The Colonial Foundation of Humanities. The text excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law.

In the process, it reveals the extent to which even post-colonial studies and European philosophy - not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism - are the progeny of colonial rule.

Siraj Ahmed is Associate Professor of English at Lehman College and CUNY Graduate Center.  He is author of The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India (2012).  Archaeology of Babel recently received Modern Language Association’s 26^th annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies.