Mridula Nath Chakraborty

Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty is the National Convener of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN). She teaches and researches on postcolonial feminist studies; on diasporic and national literatures and cultures in English, and in translation; and on film cultures of the subcontinent, at Monash University, Melbourne. Mridula has edited Being Bengali: at home and in the world, an enquiry into the intellectual history of this linguistic group from Bangladesh and India (Routledge: 2014). She is the co-editor (with Seemantini Gupta) of Abohelaar Bhangon Naame Booke/Broken by Neglect, a bilingual edition of Nunga poet and 2017 Windham-Campbell prize-winner, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poetry from English to Bengali (Jadavpur University Press: 2014). Mridula has convened high-impact projects in literary-cultural diplomacy between Australia and India, such as Australia-India Literatures International Forum (Sydney 2013) [finalist in the inaugural Australian Arts in Asia Award in 2013], the Autumn School in Literary Translation (Kolkata 2013) and Literary Commons: Writing Australia-India in the Asian Century with Indigenous, Dalit and Multilingual Tongues (2014-2016). An outcome of these collaborations was a special issue in the Cordite Poetry Review in 2016 of 50 translations in 25 languages from Dalit, Indigenous and tribal poetry from Australia and India. Subcontinental writing in these bhasha traditions is her passion and she would like to see the diversity and audacity of bhasha literatures disseminated and received the world over.