Courting India by Professor Nandini Das (1997, English), Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Oxford, has won the 11th British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.

Courting India is an account of the first English embassy to the Mughal court of Emperor Jahangir (Bloomsbury, March 2023). The book has also been longlisted for the Cundill History Prize and the HWA Crown Awards.

Professor Nandini Das works on Renaissance literature and cultural history, with special emphasis on travel and cross-cultural encounters, and issues of migration and belonging. Nandini received a PhD from the University of Cambridge following her Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, and holds a BA from Jadavpur University. She is the Vice-President of the Hakluyt Society and Literature Delegate for Oxford University Press. She has edited and written on sixteenth and early seventeenth century romance and prose fiction in Robert Greene’s Planetomachia (2007), and Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570-1620 (2011). With Tim Youngs, she co-edited The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019), which covers global Anglophone and non-Anglophone travel writing from antiquity to the internet.

Professor Das is also volume editor of Elizabethan Levant Trade and South Asia in the forthcoming edition of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, to be published by Oxford University Press, and project director for “Travel, Transculturality and Identity in Early Modern England” (TIDE), funded by the European Research Council. As a BBC New Generation Thinker, she presents television and radio programmes. She is also a long-term member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK (AHRC) and a member of the Council of Research England.

Published: 15 January 2024

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