Introducing Prof Nandini Das

FIBIS would like to introduce Professor Nandini Das as one of our Keynote Speakers who will be giving her talk at our 2024 Conference on Sunday morning, 29^th September.  Her talk is entitled “How to Greet an Elephant: Cross-cultural Encounters and the First English Embassy to India “

She introduces a profound and ground breaking aspect to one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: i.e. the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century; she offers an insider’s view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia

In 2023 Professor Das was named the winner of the 11th British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding with her latest book “Courting India”.  The British Academy Book Prize of £25,000 was established in 2013, to reward and celebrate the best works of non-fiction that demonstrate rigour and originality and have contributed to public understanding of other world cultures and their interaction.  Congratulations are in order and we are fortunate that she has agreed to be a Speaker at our Conference.

Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. She was educated at the Universities of Jadavpur (Kolkata), Oxford, and Cambridge. Among other books, she is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Travel Writing. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly presents television and radio programmes, including Tales of Tudor Travel: The Explorer’s Handbook on BBC4.  

Find out more about our 2024 Conference