Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri, ST LEE Visiting Professorial Fellow (September 2007 to January 2008)
Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor of English and Director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records at the Jadavpur University in Calcutta, India.
His chief field of study is the European Renaissance which includes Textual Studies, Translation and Urban Studies. His publication list is extensive and he is General Editor of the Oxford Tagore Translations (Oxford University Press), of which five volumes have appeared so far.
In recent years, his interests have extended to textual criticism and editorial theory, on which he is completing a book; and to tracing affinities and parallels between the European and Bengal Renaissances, with the object of defining the general paradigm of a 'Renaissance'.
During his time at the School, Professor Chaudhuri will be working on compiling and editing an anthology of English Renaissance Pastoral poetry for the Manchester Spenser series. Although the material will be entirely in English, the volume will take into account the full history of European Renaissance pastoral, include Renaissance English translations of pastoral in other languages, and if need be, add later or newly-made translations where Renaissance versions do not exist.
His chief credential for undertaking this work is the book English Pastoral and Its Renaissance Developments (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989). This book offers a full analytic survey of English Renaissance pastoral, with more accounts of continental material (chiefly Neo-Latin, Italian and French) than any single work before or, to my knowledge, since. Readers have sometimes suggested that an accompanying anthology would be useful, and I am happy to have this opportunity to compile one. It will, in fact, be the first such anthology since England’s Helicon of 1600.
Professor Chaudhuri gave a seminar as part of the Dean's Seminar on Wednesday 14th November at 12.30. He also gave a lecture as part of the ST Lee Visiting Fellow Professorial scheme on Tuesday 4th November 2007 at 17.30. View the transcript of his lecture [PDF]
