From September 12th through to the end of the month, we'll be hosting Dr. Somdatta Mandal, Professor & Head of the Department of English & Other Modern European Languages at Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, West Bengal. Dr. Mandal is visiting us on a Shastri Faculty Enrichment Fellowship in order to design a new course on Canadian Studies, and to update two courses she is already teaching on New Literatures in English and on Diasporic Literature. Her interests span across a wide register of cultural forms and practices - literature, film, cultural studies.
Somdatta Mandal is author of over 90 scholarly publications, including the books Film and Fiction: Word into Image (Rawat, 2005) and Reflections, Refractions and Rejections: Three American Writers and the Celluoloid World (Wisdom, 2002). She has translated Dirgabati Ghose's The Westward Traveller from Bengali to English and is at present doing a series of translations of colonial women's travel narratives from Bengal. She is has also edited numerous scholarly collections and editions, including The Diasporic Imagination: Asian-American Writing (3 vols, 2000) and The Indian ImagiNation: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature and Culture. (2007).
Further details can be found at: http://www.visva-bharati.ac.in/Faculty/faculties/Bhasha-Bhavana/omel/somdatta-mandal.htm
You can reach Dr. Mandal at: somdattam@gmail.com