Sukanta Chaudhuri

Sukanta Chaudhuri (b. 1950, Calcutta (Kolkata), India) is Professor Emeritus at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. A famed literary translator and editorial theorist, he was the project director of Bichitra [বিচিত্রা: বৈদ্যুতিন রবীন্দ্র‑রচনাসম্ভার Bichitra: Online Tagore Variorum : School of Cultural Texts and Records], the first temptative compendium of online publication of Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore​’s works in English and Bengali languages. 

The director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur​University and a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, Prof. Chaudhuri extensively published on the European Renaissance and textual studies, and pre-edited prepared the third Arden edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2017) and A Companion to Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance (The Manchester Spenser) (2018). He was Principal Investigator of two major projects under the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme.

Interested in urban studies, he edited the authoritative two-volume reference work Calcutta: The Living City (OUP Delhi, 1990) and wrote for many year a fortnightly column ​“View from Calcutta” for the newspaper The Asian Age. He taught at Presidency College in Kolkata from 1973 to 1991 and at Jadavpur University from 1991 till his retirement in 2010.

In The Metaphysics of Text (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Prof. Chaudhuri has combined the insights of traditional bibliography and textual criticism with recent editorial theory and theories of language. He has also translated extensively from major Indian writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sukumar Ray, Rajshekhar Bose and numerous modern Bengali poets. He is also general editor of the Oxford Tagore Translations.