Professor Santanu Das

Professor Santanu Das

PhD
Literature
Senior Research Fellow since 2019

My research interests are in early twentieth-century British, American and colonial literatures and cultures. I was educated in Kolkata and Cambridge. After a research fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge and a decade of teaching at Queen Mary and King’s College London, I came to All Souls in 2019.  I have written widely on the literary and cultural history of the First World War in an interdisciplinary and global context as well as on British modernist writing. Underpinning much of my work is an interest in the idea of ‘experience’, the challenges it raises (historical, theoretical and disciplinary), and its relation to questions of literary form and language. These ideas inform a collection of essays I am currently completing, provisionally titled Limit-Experiences: Archive, Body and the Literary in Times of War. I am also in the early stages of writing a book on the experience and imaginings of sea voyages from Victorian times to now and am involved in two major editorial projects – the Oxford Book of First World War Empire Writing and the Cambridge History of Literary London, 1914 to the Contemporary.

Links
Email: santanu.das@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
ORCID Link
Research Areas
Twentieth-century war literature and culture, particularly of the First World War
Maritime literature and aesthetics
British Modernism
Literature and Phenomenology
Colonial, postcolonial and world literatures
Theories of body, sexuality and the history of emotions

Selected Publications

Colonial Encounters in a Time of Global Conflict, 1914-1918

ed. Santanu Das, Anna Maguire and Daniel Steinbach (London and New York: Routledge, 2022)

India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images and Songs

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity

(Coedited, with Kate McLoughlin), London: British Academy and Oxford University Press, (2018)

1914-1918: Indian Troops in Europe /L’Inde dans la Grande Guerre, les Cipayes sur le front de l'ouest

(Paris: Gallimard, 2014; Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2015).

(Edited) Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War

(Cambridge University Press, 2013)

(Edited) Race, Empire and First World War Writing

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Current Projects
  1. The Oxford Book of First World War Empire Writing
  2. Limit-Experiences: Archive, Body and the Literary in the Time of War (under contract with Cambridge University Press)
  3. The Cambridge History of Literary London, 1914-Now (co-edited with Maria DiBattista)
  4. Sail to Steam: Maritime Literature in World Culture (work in progress)