Shormishtha Panja

Shormishtha Panja retired as Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi in January 2023. She received her PhD from Brown University where she was awarded the Jean Starr Untermeyer Fellowship. She has taught at Stanford Universiy and IIT Delhi. She has been Head, Department of English, and Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi. She has also been Joint Director and Director (Interim Charge) of Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi. Her areas of specialisation include Shakespeare studies, early modern studies, feminism in India, gender studies and visual culture. She has been invited to deliver over eighty lectures, including keynotes and plenaries, on Shakespeare in India and Indian feminism in Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Egypt, Europe, Russia, the UK, the USA and all over India. She has published over forty articles and book chapters in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Bulletin, Journal of Narrative Technique, Early Theatre, Shakespearean International Yearbook and other journals and collections. She is on the Advisory Board of the Arden book series, Shakespeare and Adaptation. She has authored Sidney, Spenser and the Royal Reader and edited/co-edited eight other books, including Performing Shakespeare in India: Exploring Indianness, Literatures and Cultures, soon to be published in a revised edition, Shakespeare and Class, Shakespeare and the Art of Lying, Word Image Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture and Signifying the Self: Women and Literature. She is currently working on a book-length study on Shakespeare and India, analysing translations, theatrical and cinematic adaptations, visual culture and more.
She has been awarded a Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, USA and a Mayers Fellowship at the Huntington, USA. She has been awarded the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute’s Institutional Collaborative Research Grant. She has been the President of the Shakespeare Society of India from 2008 to 2014 and a member of the steering committee of Theatre Without Borders.