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Dr Santanu Das, BA (Calcutta) BA PhD (Cambridge)
Senior Lecturer

Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 2688
email: s.das@qmul.ac.uk

Research interests:

• Early twentieth-century English literature and culture, particularly First World War 
• Theories of the body, senses and affect
• Cultures of colonialism, particularly South Asia

Educated in Calcutta and Cambridge, Santanu Das joined Queen Mary in 2005, initially as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, from a research fellowship at St. John’s College, Cambridge.  He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge, 2006, ppk 2008) which recovered and analysed the role of the senses, particularly touch, in First World War experience and literature, and for which he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2009. His work on war literature has appeared in journals such as Modernism/Modernity, Textual Practice and The American Scholar, and he has recently written on E.M.Forster for The Cambridge Companion to the English Novel (2010).

He is currently working on the international, particularly the colonial, aspects of First World War experience and writing. This has involved editing a volume of essays titled Race, Empire and the First World War (Cambridge, forthcoming) and a monograph on India and First World War literature (in progress). He has strong interests in early twentieth-century poetry and the short story, and will be giving the British Academy Chatterton lecture on the poetry of D.H.Lawrence later this year.

He welcomes PhD students working on most aspects of early twentieth-century literature and culture as well on theories of the body, gender and sexuality, and histories of emotion and affect.

Publications:

Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

(Edited) Race, Empire and First World War Writing. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming

‘E.M.Forster’. The Cambridge Companion to the English Novel. Ed. Adrian Poole. Cambridge University Press (forthcoming)

‘Writing Empire, Fighting War’. A Part of History. Intr. Sir Michael Howard. Constable (forthcoming)

‘On Touching: Painting, Poetry and the First World War’. In(ter)discipline. Intr. Gillian Beer and Beate Perry. Legenda, 2007 (forthcoming)

“War Poetry and the Realm of the Senses”. Handbook on Modern War Poetry. Ed Tim Kendall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007

“India, Women and the First World War”. Women’s Movements: International Perspectives, 1914-1919. Ed. Alison Fell and Ingrid Sharp. Palgrave, 2007

“‘Sepoys, Sahibs and Babus: Reading and Writing about the Great War in India”. First World War and Publishing. Ed Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed. Palgrave, 2007

‘The War Poets, 1914-1918’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2007

‘“Kiss me, Hardy”: Intimacy, Gender and Gesture in First World War Trench Literature'. Modernism/Modernity, January 2002. Reprinted as “Kiss me, Hardy: The Dying Kiss in the First World War Trenches” in The Kiss in History. Ed Karen Harvey. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Reprinted in The Book of Touch. Ed Constance Classen. Berg: Oxford , 2005. Excerpted in The American Scholar, Autumn 2000

“'The Impotence of Sympathy: Touch and Trauma in First World War Women's Writing”. Textual Practice, 19:2 (June), 2005

‘Bloomsbury Lives’. Review of Barbara Caine, From Bombay to Bloomsbury. For History Workshop Journal (forthcoming)

“First World War Poetry”. Literature in English Post-1914 . Ed Ian Mackean. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005

‘Imperious Women': review of Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India in Women: A Cultural Review, March 2004, Vol 15:1