About the event:

The second session for the CWC’s E&E Online Seminar Series will be led by Prof. Sachin Labade, Professor & Head at the Department of English, University of Mumbai. Prof. Labade will give participants an overview of his co-authored chapter in New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research (Multilingual Matters, 2024). He will offer a glimpse at the survival of colonial prescriptivism in India through the publication history of popular Indian usage guides, before discussing what contemporary Indian English usages tell us about attitudes towards such prescriptivism. This will be followed by an open floor where the participants will get to discuss the reading directly with its author.

About the speaker:

Dr. Sachin Labade is Professor and Head at the Department of English, University of Mumbai. He has previously held additional charge as Honorary Coordinator, Indo-Canadian Studies Centre (ICSC) and as Co-Director, Mumbai Münster Institute of Advanced Studies (MMIAS) at the University of Mumbai. Prof. Labade was awarded a PhD in English for a dissertation on the semiotics of queer positioning in Indian film narrative under the guidance of R. Raj Rao by the Savitribai Phule Pune University (formerly University of Pune). His interests include queer studies, English Language Teaching, and the sociolinguistics of English in India. Prof. Labade has been awarded visiting fellowships by Bielefeld University and the Dresden University of Technology to teach courses on queer studies. Notable recent publications include the co-authored textbook Communication Skills in English (Orient BlackSwan, 2021), co-authored chapters on Indian Englishes in the edited volumes Modelling World Englishes: A Joint Approach to Postcolonial and Non-Postcolonial Varieties (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research (Multilingual Matters, 2024), and Evolving Englishes: Varieties through Space and Time (Routledge, 2026), as well as a chapter on the trajectory of the queer in Indian cinema, in Critical Social Science Perspectives on Indian Cinema (Aakar Books & Routledge, 2026).

Please register for the event here: https://forms.gle/3RpYgNF1GUgnLVcP8