Professor Nandini Das

Nandini Das is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. She studied English at Jadavpur University, India, before coming to the UK as a Rhodes Scholar to read English at University College, Oxford, followed by a doctorate at Trinity College, Cambridge.
She is a scholar of Renaissance literature, travel, migration, and cross-cultural encounters, and has published widely on these topics, from their appearance in the writings of major sixteenth and seventeenth century authors such as Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and Cervantes, to the fleeting presence of three Japanese boys in sixteenth century Portuguese-held Goa, India. Among her books are Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570-1620 (2011) and The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019), co-edited with Tim Youngs, and as project director for the European Research Council funded ‘Travel, Transculturality and Identity in Early Modern England’ (ERC-TIDE) project, she has co-written and edited Keywords of Identity and Lives in Transit, about early modern English concepts around identity and race and the lives they touched. She is volume editor of Elizabethan Levant Trade and South Asia in the forthcoming Oxford edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598-1600) and editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Travel, Race and Identity in Early Modern England. Her most recent book, Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire, received the 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly presents television and radio programmes on her research.

Her work has received funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Leverhulme Trust, the UK India Education & Research Initiative (UKIERI), and the European Research Council. She sits on multiple national and international grant awarding panels and advisory boards. A founding member of UKRI Research England Council (2016-2022) and a current member of the UK Committee on Research Integrity, she is involved in committees across multiple areas, including REF, Open Access, EDI, and research funding at national and international levels.