Professor Supriya Chaudhuri
Jadavpur University
Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor of English and Co-ordinator of the Centre of Advanced Study at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She works mainly on European Renaissance literature and on Indian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, with strong interests in the novel, theory and cinema. Among her recent publications are a translation, with critical introduction, of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Relationships (Oxford University Press, Oxford Tagore Translations Series, 2005); an edited collection of essays on Literature and Philosophy (Papyrus, 2006); ‘The Absence of Caliban: Shakespeare and Colonial Modernity’, in Shakespeare’s World/ World Shakespeares, ed. Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jansohn and R. S. White (University of Delaware Press, 2008); and ‘Lucius, thou art translated: Adlington’s Apuleius’, Renaissance Studies, 22.5 (November 2008)
While at CRASSH she will be working on ‘Subjects and Persons in Early Modern India: Genre, Gender and Nation’, looking at the link between the adaptation in modern India of the European genre of the novel, and the emergence of the early modern subject. The notion of the person as a relational identity, located in a material environment, claiming a continuity of emotional and spiritual life, and making a set of logically coherent intellectual claims upon the institutional apparatus of the modern world, is connected to the possibility of the representation of such persons in forms of life-writing and in the novel. The transmission of ideas and texts through the agency of the printing press was crucial to reform and social change in 19th century Bengal. Professor Chaudhuri would like to look specifically at the transmission of generic models as creating a space for certain kinds of early modern experience, and producing the impetus towards institutional reform. In addition, she hopes to complete the critical introduction to an anthology of early modern (European) travel writing on India.
