This week’s speaker is Professor Debarati Bandyopadhyay, International Visiting Fellow at Essex
Debarati works in the Department of English, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India. Visva-Bharati was founded by Nobel Laureate for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore, and Professor Bandyopadhyay co-ordinates the Special Assistance Programme for research on ‘Rabindranath Tagore: East-West Confluence’, which was awarded to her Department by the Government of India. She has been Head of the Department for the last three years. Publications include her book, Melancholy Impressions: Re-reading Thomas Hardy’s Major Novels. For the last few years, Professor Bandyopadhyay has been researching and writing about place-based ethics in New Nature Writing and Ecocriticism. She will be talking about the work of her University in environmental practice and theories of ecocriticism.