Rutwij Nakhwa
Mumbai, Maharashtra| Grant Category: | Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowships |
| Project Title: | Rethinking the State: Hegel, Beckett, Poetry |
| Field of Study: | Language/Literature/Linguistics |
| Home Institution: | Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Mumbai, Maharashtra |
| Host Institution: | University of Chicago , Chicago, IL |
| Grant Start Month: | October 2025 |
| Duration of Grant: | Nine months |
Brief Bio:
Mr. Rutwij Nakhwa is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. His dissertation is on Hegel’s political philosophy. His research interests lie in Marx, psychoanalysis, film and literary theory, and B. R. Ambedkar. Since 2018, he has taught and guest-lectured at the Mass Media Department of St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. For years, Rutwij covered India’s film festivals as a journalist and in various other capacities. He has written on cinema for The Hindu. He holds a post-graduate diploma in critical theory, aesthetics, and practice from Jnanapravaha Mumbai (2018) and a bachelor’s degree in Mass Media (Journalism) from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai (2017).
In 2024, Rutwij’s paper, ‘An Absolute Hegelianism for Postmodern Times: Hegel with Lacan after Bataille and Derrida’, was published in the Filozofija i društvo/Philosophy and Society journal. He has presented his work on Hegel at several conferences including those organised by Hegelian and philosophical societies, and on Ambedkar at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad.
As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Rutwij’s interdisciplinary work will interface Hegel’s philosophy with poetic and literary work, primarily that of Samuel Beckett. His research aims at a philosophical-literary examination of (conceptual and figural) endings and beginnings in relation to our time of repetitive crises, a time in which even the imagination of alternatives seems impossible. In response, this project’s wager is to think of a different repetition, which will pinpoint the peculiar conditions of possibility for imagination and creation of alternatives, allowing for a transformative reactualization of Hegel’s philosophy, for our present.