Prof. Subha Mukherji

Profile of Subha Mukherji

Biography

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

Edition in progress: Shakespeare and Fletcher's King Henry VIII for the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions (CSE) (CUP, 2028)

Visiting Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, through September 2026

Keynote speeches in 2025-26: at the German Shakespeare Association's biennial conference on 'Shakespeare and Truth', Bochum, April 2026; at the conference on 'Borders: Literary, Cultural and Political Dialogues' in Athens (University of Athens and HASE, May 2026; at the 11th Biennial conference Society for Renaissance Studies in Bristol in June 2025; at the 15th IASEMS conference in Lecce, Italy, on 'Waters: Fluidity and Crossing in Shakespeare and early Modern Texts': 'Weary of solid firmness': towards a migrant poetics. https://www.iasems.org/?p=2194

Panelist on 'Migrant Forms' at HowTheLightGetsIn@Hay Festival 2025, with Ntalya Din-Kariuki, Issam Kourbaj and Rowan Williams: hhttps://iai.tv/video/migrant-forms?_auid=2020

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

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.

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/

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. 

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/

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.

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.

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