Nandini Das

Professor Nandini Das
Born	1974 (age 49–50) Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Occupation(s)	Academic and literary scholar
Title	Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture
Academic background
Alma mater	Jadavpur University University College, Oxford Trinity College, Cambridge
Thesis	Romance and the development of prose fiction in Renaissance England (2003)
Academic work
Institutions	University of Liverpool Exeter College, Oxford

Nandini Das (born November 1974) is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. She is a specialist in Shakespeare studies, Renaissance romance writing, early travel literature, and encounters between different cultures.

Early life

Nandini Das grew up in India and studied the sciences at school, and after working as a software programmer in the publishing industry for a year, decided to return to academic research. Aged about 10, she was inspired by seeing Vanessa Redgrave in William Shakespeare's As You Like It on Indian television. She earned a BA in English from Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India, after which she moved to Britain on a Rhodes scholarship to study English at University College, Oxford (BA). She subsequently earned her M.Phil and PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Career

Das was professor of English literature at the University of Liverpool until October 2019, when she became a Tutorial Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford and Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at Oxford. Her research relates to cultural and intellectual history for the period 1600 to 1750 including fiction, accounts of early travel and encounters between different cultures.

She has edited a scholarly edition of Robert Greene's Planetomachia (1585) in 2007 and is the volume editor for Elizabethan Levant trade and South Asia of Richard Hakluyt's 'Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffikes, and Discoveries of the English Nation.

She is project director of the Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c.1550-1700 (TIDE) project.

She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a member of the council of Research England, and a member of the Peer Review College of Britain's Arts and Humanities Research Council.

In September 2018, she presented Tales of Tudor Travel: The Explorer's Handbook on BBC Four. She has appeared as an expert commentator in the historical documentaries Henry VIII (2020) for Channel 5 and The Boleyns: A Scandalous Family (2021) for BBC Two.

Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire won the 2023 British Academy Book Prize.

Selected publications

• Nandini Das (2023). Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781526615640.
• Nandini Das; Tim Youngs, eds. (2018). The Cambridge History of Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781316556740.
• Nandini Das, ed. (2017). Hakluyt's Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffikes, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1598-1600. Volume VI: Elizabethan Levant Trade and South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Nandini Das; Nick Davis, eds. (2016). Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama. Routledge. ISBN 9780367175764.
• Nandini Das; John Batchelor, eds. (2011). Travel and Prose Fiction in Early Modern England. Yearbook of English Studies. Leeds: MHRA. ISBN 9781907322235.
• Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570-1620. Farnham: Ashgate. 2011. ISBN 9781409410133.
• Nandini Das (2007). Nandini Das (ed.). Robert Greene's Planetomachia. Aldershot: Ashgate. ISBN 9781315244037.