Rosinka Chaudhuri

Rosinka Chaudhuri (D.Phil. Oxon) is Professor of Cultural Studies and also current Director at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). She is a member of St Hugh's College, Oxford, and has held visiting positions at University College London, King's College London, Delhi University, Cambridge University and Columbia University.

Personal life

She is married to Amit Chaudhuri, who is a renowned Indian novelist, poet, essayist, and musician; they have one daughter, Aruna, a singer-songwriter based in London.

Academic life

Her books include Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Seagull: 2002), Freedom and Beef-Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (Orient Blackswan: 2012), and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere (Oxford University Press: 2013, Peter Lang: 2014). She has also edited and introduced Derozio, Poet of India: A Definitive Edition (Oxford University Press, 2008), The Indian Postcolonial (with Elleke Boehmer, Routledge, 2010), A History of Indian Poetry in English (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2016), An Acre of Green Grass and Other English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose (OUP, 2018) and George Orwell's Burmese Days (Oxford World Classics, 2021).

In addition she has translated and introduced the complete text of the letters Rabindranath Tagore wrote his niece Indira Debi as a young man, calling it Letters from a Young Poet (1887-94) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2014). Her present research is tentatively titled India's First Radicals: Young Bengal under the British Empire.

Her work lies at the intersection of literature and history, in the area broadly known as Cultural Studies. She has worked on the nineteenth-century literary sphere in Bengal, looking at the formation of a modern cultural sphere in the context of episodes surrounding the writing of poetry; on Tagore, on his translations in Gitanjali from the Bengali as well as the incantatory musicality of his Bengali poetry; on Indian poetry in English, introducing the tradition and its development; and on Postcolonial Studies, on which she has a revisionist take. Currently she is thinking about the category into which the polemic of Postcolonial Studies seems to have retreated: World Literature, and wondering where the 'world' in World Literature is.