Professor of English

Shormishtha Panja is Professor of English and Director, Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi, India.  She received her PhD from Brown University, USA, where she was awarded the Jean Starr Untermeyer Fellowship.  Her areas of scholarly interest are early modern studies, Shakespeare in India, visual culture and gender studies.  Her seven books include Performing Shakespeare in India: Exploring ‘Indianness’ Literatures and Cultures (co-ed.)(in press); Shakespeare and Class (co-ed.) (2014); Shakespeare and the Art of Lying (ed.) (2013), Word Image Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture (co-ed.) (2009); and Signifying the Self: Women and Literature (co-ed.)(rpt. 2004).  She has published articles on early modern studies in journals and collections such as Shakespearean International Yearbook, English Literary Renaissance, Journal of Narrative Technique and in two Renaissance collections published by Ashgate.  She has recently contributed an invited essay on Shakespeare in India to the Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre (2016). 

She has been awarded fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library and has been invited to lecture on Shakespeare and Indian feminism in universities in Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA. She has been a Fellow at the Salzburg Seminar, and a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the international group of early modern scholars, Theater Without Borders.  She has been Head, Department of English; and Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi, as well as the President of the Shakespeare Society of India for two terms.  She is the founder member of PEHEL: Delhi University Women’s Support Group, now in its eleventh year.