Ashoka University professor wins the Omega Resilience Awards (ORA) fellowship
Prof. Sumana Roy has been awarded the Omega Resilience Awards fellowship for her outstanding contributions to the field of plant humanities
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In a momentous celebration of academic excellence and interdisciplinary research, Ashoka University takes immense pride in congratulating Professor Sumana Roy on receiving the prestigious Omega Resilience Awards (ORA) fellowship. This esteemed recognition is a testament to her outstanding contributions in the field of Indian Plant Humanities.
The project she is working on titled “Shaping the discipline of Plant Humanities in India to rekindle the relationships between communities and their botanical worlds”.An author and academic, Sumana Roy is building an archive of the literature on plant life in the Indian subcontinent that has existed over the last two millennia. Her book ‘How I Became a Tree’, is recognized as a seminal work in ‘philosophical botany’, across diverse readerships worldwide.
Trying to create a discipline such as the Indian Plant Humanities, and resuscitate it not through a narrative of crisis and apocalypse but a philosophy of ananda, to reestablish a vocabulary of intimacy and kinship with the plant world — this is long and invisible labor. To be rewarded for this quiet work by being selected as an inaugural fellow of ORA India is, therefore, both a surprise and support for my work, and I am very grateful for that.
Sumana Roy
Sumana Roy is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. She is working on the Indian Plant Humanities project with the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability, Ashoka University. Prior to this, she taught English Literature in government colleges in Bengal. She was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich (2018), and a Full Time Visiting Fellow at the South Asia Program, Cornell University (Fall 2018).
Her poems, essays and stories have been published in The Paris Review, Lit Hub, The Point, Granta, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, LARB, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Common, The White Review, Berfrois, The Journal of South Asian Studies, American Book Review, among other places.
(Content Credits – https://omega.ngo/presenter/ora-fellow/sumana-roy/)
