Invited talk had to be withdraw for visa reason, can it be on CV?

As long as you're honest about it, I suppose you could put it on a CV. However, I don't think an invitation to give a talk is likely to count for anything if you didn't actually give the talk - it raises more questions than it's worth.


It's a bad idea to put it on your curriculum. You should list on the curriculum things you have done, not things you could have done or might have done. Listing such things could generate questions about the credibility of what else is on the curriculum. Everyone has some mishaps along the way and can't do something that was planned; most never even think of listing it on a curriculum, so those that do so potentially generate skepticism about motivations.

In some metric obsessed institutional contexts it can appear that a single item on the curriculum has an importance it does not really have. Being invited to give talks is a nice thing, interesting for many reasons, but will never be decisive when a curriculum is evaluated. When one cuts through the nonsense, what principally matters on a curriculum are publications (quality and quantity), funding obtained in competitive contexts, and, in some contexts, teaching experience/ability (for engineers, one might add patents and commercialization to the list). All the rest is of marginal importance.

Finally, you do not want to create the impression that you do things in order to have them on your curriculum (as opposed to for their own sake). That might appeal to some deanish/director types, but it doesn't appeal to those who take their craft seriously, who are those most likely to be judging the curriculum.