Prof Subha Mukherji, Fitzwilliam

sm10014@cam.ac.uk

 

 

Biographical Information

Subha Mukherji is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture. She was educated in Kolkata, Oxford and Cambridge.

Research Interests

Renaissance literature; early modern drama; Shakespeare; literary form and epistemology; genre - especially tragedy and tragicomedy; faith and form; law and literature; the poetics of space; interdisciplinary methodologies; migration and the humanities.

Book-in-progress: Knowing Encounters: Questioning Knowledge in Early Modern Literature

Commissioned to edit Shakespeare and Fletcher's King Henry VIII for the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions (CSE); under contract with CUP, for 2028

Consultant Advisor on the Esmee Fairburn grant/project of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, for decolobising their Indian collections.

Member of the Management Committee and Working Group of the Cost Action project People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean, or PIMo, based in Florence: http://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/workgroups/thingsinmotion/

Awarded, with Martin Crowley, a Global Humanities Initiative Grant (2022) by Cambridge University to form a collaborative teaching and research programme with Ashoka University, New Delhi. Our project, 'Migrant Ecologies', was launched in March 2023 in New Delhi where I was Visiting Professor. Collaborative partners at Ashoka: Jonathan Gil Harris and Sumana Roy.

Invited Respondent at the Cost-funded PIMO workshop on 'The Mobility of Postcards and Souvenirs in the Mediterranean and Beyond: Frames of Memories and Emotional keepsakes', Terra Murata, Scuola di Procida, with Università di Napoli Orientale, September 2023. 

Principal Investigator on the 5.25-year interdisciplinary project, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: the Place of Literature, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/crossroads, 2014-2019.

Conceived and co-curated the exhibition, Renaissance Spaces of Knowing: Privacy and Performance, which can be accessed here: https://crossroads-spacesofknowing.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/

Also conceived and co-convened a radically interdisciplinary event on Migrant Knowledge, Early Modern and Beyond, in September 2019, bringing together scholars, activists and artists. Links to a documentary on the event:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1b3la2jCB-XaEL7lT8lPaLHed3y_AVp44

https://youtu.be/rOJ117-BA-g

Related link to event webpage: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28626

Hurst Visiting Professorial Lecture: https://english.wustl.edu/events/visiting-hurst-professor-subha-mukherji-lecture

Cambridge Admissions Office (CAO) film on English at Cambridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bolBo6nbN0Y

 

 

 

 

Areas of Graduate Supervision

Early modern drama; Renaissance genres; literature and cultural history; theology and literature; law and literature; interdisciplinarity; epistemology; sexuality and literature in early modern England; 17th century devotional poetry; rhetoric; representation and response; poetics of space across cultures; migration, migrant knowledge and migrant art-forms. Authors of particular interest: Hooker; Bacon; Marlowe; Lancelelot Andrewes; Shakespeare; Webster; Massinger; Ford; (Thomas) Heywood; Herbert.

Selected Publications

  •  'The masks of law: the poetics of hypokrisis in the early modern judicial theatre', invited essay submitted for publication in Peter Goodrich and Julie Stone Peters, eds, Performing Law (expected publication in 2024)
  • Knowing Justice: Literature and the Legal Imaginary, ed. (with Dunstan Roberts), forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 
  • The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England, ed. (with Elizabeth Swann),  in Press, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan, 2024
  • Crossings: Migrant Knowledge, Migrant Forms, ed. (with Natalya Din-Kariuki and Rowan Williams), forthcoming with punctum books, 2024.
  • "Intimate Estrangements': Bharti Kher's The Body is a Place at the Arnolfini', Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, 6 February 2023 (review article). http://www.thirdtext.org/mukherji-bhartikher
  • "'The intelligence of blind things': the insouciant art of Bharti Kher", in Aveek Sen, ed., The Trick is Living (Nature Morte Gallery: New Delhi, 2022), pp. 93-101. 
  • 'Injurious Forms': a review of Bharti Kher's Strange Attractors, in Critical Collective, June 2022: https://criticalcollective.in/ArtistInner2.aspx?Aid=79...  
  • "'Footfalls Echo in the Memory': Displaced Durgas and Migrant Forms", Humanities Underground, 23 February 2022: https://humanitiesunderground.org/footfalls-echo-in-the-memory-displaced-durgas-and-migrant-forms/?fbclid=IwAR1dDHRcekroe4Hr7XFYi4wb-lzUGbXuVuPt0ZxPb97wJiFVbOHXJ_n5xIc
  • 'Dying and Living with de la Mare', PN Review, Issue 262 (Nov/Dec 2021), pp. 7-9  <https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=11134>
  • “‘Those are pearls’: transformation, translation and exchange”, in Patrick McGrath and Regina Schwartz, eds, Toward a Sacramental Poetics (Notre Dame University Press, 2021), pp. 37-67. Link to book: https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268201494/toward-a-sacramental-poetics/
  • Renaissance Spaces of Knowing: Privacy and Performance: an online, multi-media exhibition: https://crossroads-spacesofknowing.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/ (co-curator)
  • Ed., with Dunstan Roberts, Rebecca Tomlin and George Oppitz-Trotman, Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Change and Exchange (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
  • With Rebecca Tomlin, 'Introduction: Change and Exchange', in Subha Mukherji, Dunstan Roberts, Rebecca Tomlin and George Oppitz-Trotman, eds., Change and Exchange: Literature and Economics in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
  • 'Forms of Justice': review article in Shakespeare Studies 47, 2019, pp. 263-278. http://sites.bu.edu/shakespearestudies/home/current-issue/
  • 'Facing Justice: Evidence, Legibility and Pensiveness in the Early Modern Imagination', in Maksymillian del Mar, Bernadette Meyler and Simon Stern, eds, The Oxford Handbook to Law and the Humanities (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 353-372.
  • Ed., Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World (Medieval Institute Publications/De Gruyter, 2019): as editor and contributor. 
  • Ed. (with Tim Stuart-Buttle), Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Knowing Faith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). For a Q&A, see http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/post/knowing-faith-5-questions-to-subha-mukherji
  • ‘Crossroads of Knowledge: Literature and Theology’, in Subha Mukherji and Tim Stuart-Buttle, eds, Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Knowing Faith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 3-36.
  • ‘“O she’s warm”: the sensory numinous in Shakespeare’s drama’, in E. Murphy, R. McDonald and E. Swann, Sensing the Sacred: Religion and the Senses in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World (Taylor and Francis/Routledge, 2018), pp. 227-252.
  • ‘“A kind of conquest”: the Erotics and Aesthetics of Italy in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline’, in Enza De Francisci and Chris Stamatakis, eds., Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange: Early Modern to Present (Taylor and Francis/Routledge, 2017),  pp. 96-110.
  • ‘‘The action of my life’: tragedy, tragicomedy, and Shakespeare’s mimetic experiments’: in Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk, eds, The Oxford Handbook to Shakespearean Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 267-84.
  • ‘Outgrowing Adonis, outgrowing Ovid: the disorienting narrative of Venus and Adonis’: in Jonathan Post, ed., The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare’s Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 396-412.
  • ‘Seeing, knowing, believing: the epistemic plot and the poetics of doubt in early modern literature’, in Batsaki, Mukherji and Schramm, eds., Fictions of Knowledge; Fact, Evidence, Doubt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 84-10.
  • Ed. (with Yota Batsaki and Jan-Melissa Schramm), Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
  • ‘Middleton and the Rule of Law’, in Thomas Middleton in Context, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 106-13.
  • “‘Invasion from Outer Space’: the threshold of annunciations”, in Subha Mukherji, ed., Thinking on Thresholds: the Poetics of Transitive Spaces (Anthem, 2011), pp. 43-70.
  • Ed., Thinking on Thresholds: the Poetics of Transitive Spaces (Anthem Press, 2011).
  • Ed. (with Raphael Lyne), Early Modern Tragicomedy (Boydell & Brewer, 2007).
  • ‘False trials and the impulse to try in Shakespeare and his contemporaries’, in Thinking With Shakespeare: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Essays, Ed. William Poole and Richard Scholar (Legenda, 2007), pp. 53-74.
  • ‘False trials in Shakespeare, Massinger and Ford’, Essays in Criticism 56.3, 2006, 219-240.
  • “Jonson's The New Inn and a revisiting of the amorous jurisdiction”, Law and Literature 18.2, 2006, 149-69.
  • Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2006); paperback reprint 2009.
  • ‘Women, law and dramatic realism in early modern England’, English Literary Renaissance 35.2, 2005, 248-72.
  • Subha Mukherji, “‘Unmanly indignities’: adultery and judgement in Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness’, in  Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson, eds., Literature, Politics and the Law in Renaissance England, (Palgrave, 2004), pp. 71-99.
  • “‘Lawfull deede’: Consummation, Custom and Law in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well”, Shakespeare Survery 49, 1996, 181-200.

Non-academic publication involving transferable skills: co-authored (with Dr Alessandro Pastore) two versions of a business case for the Bologna Business School, as a learning resource for business schools globally: 'Google vs Enel: Innovation, Market Ethics and Strategies of Energy Transition': https://www.thecasecentre.org/products/view?id=181819,

https://www.thecasecentre.org/products/view?id=181821