Santanu Das
Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, University of Oxford
I am a professor of modern literature and culture at University of Oxford and a senior fellow at All Souls College. My work focuses on early 20th-century literature and culture, and I am especially interested in the relationship between experience, writing and emotion in times of conflict. My research also concerns colonial and postcolonial literature (particularly from South Asia); theories of the body, emotion and the senses; and modernism and travel writing. I am a 2010 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner. My first book examined the role of the senses, particularly touch, in First World War experience and literature, while my recent work has focused on the colonial dimensions of war culture and memory through an expanded notion of the ‘archive’ – artifacts, photographs, paintings, rumors, folk songs and sound recordings, as well as testimonial, political and literary writings. I have just completed a monograph on India and First World War culture and work on the experience and imaginings of sea voyages in a global context, from Victorian times to now.
EXPs by Santanu Das
Around 4 million men of color were recruited during the First World War into the European and American armies, and of them, almost 1.5 million Indians. How does one understand the difficult, often contradictory legacies of war and empire, and the way they continue to haunt us, even today.
Touch is the one sense that completely defeats the powers of representation. Literature struggles through metaphors, images and narrative structures to communicate this most intimate and almost evanescent of the senses.
The transition from sail to steam, the distinction that we always had between the industrial worker on land and the sailor on the sea, is a fundamental crisis in the maritime world, and is reflected in maritime literature.