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The moderator for Crossfire 2012 is Dr. Vinod Balakrishnan is an Associate Professor in English in the Department of Humanities at National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. He earned his Ph.D in “Popular Fiction and the Use of History” from Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. He was a Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, New York in 2008. He is a recipient of a Bronze Medal for poetry by the National Library of Poetry, USA. His poems have been archived and widely anthologized. He is the author of Indian Classics in English Translation and has coauthored a book on Literary Theory. His articles have appeared in The Quest, CIEFL Bulletin, Journal of English Language Teaching and Indian Express. His research concentrates on Pop Culture Studies, Cultural Studies, and Indian Poetics. His current research interests include East-West Peace Studies, Pop Fiction, Politics of Representation and History of Thought. He is currently working on “Networks and Mobility in Literature”