Nandini Das

Nandini Das (born November 1974) is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. She is a specialist in Shakespeare studies, Renaissance romance writing, early travel literature, and encounters between different cultures. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2026.

Early life Nandini Das grew up in India and studied the sciences at school, and after working as a software programmer in the publishing industry for a year, decided to return to academic research. Aged about 10, she was inspired by seeing Vanessa Redgrave in William Shakespeare's As You Like It on Indian television. She earned a BA in English from Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India, after which she moved to Britain on a Rhodes scholarship to study English at University College, Oxford (BA). She subsequently earned her M.Phil and PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Career Das was professor of English literature at the University of Liverpool until October 2019, when she became a Tutorial Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford and Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at Oxford. Her research relates to cultural and intellectual history for the period 1600 to 1750 including fiction, accounts of early travel and encounters between different cultures.

She has edited a scholarly edition of Robert Greene's Planetomachia (1585) in 2007 and is the volume editor for Elizabethan Levant trade and South Asia of Richard Hakluyt's 'Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffikes, and Discoveries of the English Nation.

She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, In 2025 she was elected a fellow of the English Association.

In September 2018, she presented Tales of Tudor Travel: The Explorer's Handbook on BBC Four. She has appeared as an expert commentator in the historical documentaries Henry VIII (2020) for Channel 5 and The Boleyns: A Scandalous Family (2021) for BBC Two.

Honours and awards Das' book Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire won the 2023 British Academy Book Prize. It was also shortlisted for the 2024 Wolfson History Prize.

Das was appointed an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the 2025 New Year Honours for services to interdisciplinary research in the humanities and public engagement. In December 2025, a portrait of Das was unveiled by the Bodleian Library and the British Journal of Photography as part of their Catalysts series, celebrating "Oxford University's leading innovators whose work is reshaping health, society, and the environment worldwide." In 2026, Das was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Selected publications