About

Home / About

Professor Sreemati Mukherjee (Retd. November - 2025)

Dr. Sreemati Mukherjee is a Professor in the Department of Performing Arts at Presidency University, Kolkata. Her areas of specialization are Narrative Theory, Feminist Theory and Criticism, Cultural studies, African-American and African women’s writing, 19th century Bengali women’s writing, Indian women writing in English, Postcolonial theory and criticism, Translation Studies, East-West dramatic theories and Rabindranath Tagore and his music. For her PhD, she used a comparative framework to study the many interrelationships between gender, genre, postcolonial contexts and writing as agency, with special emphasis on African and African American women's writing. She has also explored at length the emergence of a black feminist critical vocabulary, which stresses matrilineal traditions in art. Sreemati Mukherjee has also been extensively trained in Rabindrasangeet and has produced documentaries on the Presidency University Museum and Bibha Sengupta, renowned Rabindrasangeet maestro.

Download Resume
About

In her latest book Women and the Romance of the Word: 19th Century Contexts in Bengal (Bloomsbury, 2024), she looks at the emergence of the sign woman in the cultural symbolic of the second half of the 19th century in Bengal through a magnificent efflorescence of writing in autobiography, polemics and travelogue writing. She reads this moment as a 'romantic' encounter between women and language.

In her earlier book The Many Dialogues of the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita (Hawakal, 2021) she has used the dialogic framework suggested for the novel by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination, to read the Kathamrita as offering multiple dialogues between empiricism and faith, myth and history, historical documentation and music as epistemology, Shakta and Vaishnav epistemologies to create a symphonic text. Both these books were reviewed in The Telegraph.

  • Professor

    Department of Performing Arts, Presidency University, Kolkata, India

    June 2016 – Present
  • Associate Professor

    Department of English, Basanti Devi College, Kolkata, India

    November 1996 – June 2016
  • Teaching Assistant

    Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, US

    Fall 1990
Academic Qualifications
  • PhD, Jadavpur University
    April 2005
  • M.A. English, Jadavpur University
    1989
  • M.A. Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, U.S.A.
    1992
  • B.A. English, Presidency College, University of Calcutta
    1982
  • National Eligibility Test (N.E.T), UGC
    1994
  • State Level Eligibility Test (S.L.E.T), WBCSC
    1994
  • Diplôme de langue Française, Alliance Française du Bengale, Calcutta
    1995
Music Training
  • Hindustani Classical Vocal – A.T. Kanan, Kabita Gupta
  • Light Classical Vocal – Amarnath Mukherjee
  • Rabindrasangeet – Smt. Bibha Sengupta, Smt. Maya Sen, Smt. Gita Sen, Smt. Bharati Mukherjee
  • Fulbright Visiting Lecturer Fellowship, 2011

    San Diego State University, Department of English and Comparative Literature.

  • Panorama International Book Award, 2023

    Writers Capital Foundation.

Dialogue as Wisdom (The Telegraph) Ahead of their Times (The Telegraph)

Another recent essay which appears in The Long History of Partition in Bengal (Routledge, 2024) is entitled "Memory as Cinematic Praxis: The Art of Ritwik Ghatak" and an essay on Chinua Achebe appears in Chinua Achebe: Voice and Vision (University Press Ltd.). Her list of publications also includes multiple essays on gender, culture, history and theory interfaces, published by Routledge , Amsterdam University Press and other prestigious publishing houses. She has translated Rabindranath Tagore’s "Bhagini Nivedita" (2016), "Kabitar Katha" from Jibanananda Das’s Kabitar Katha (2022) and Alokeranjan Dasgupta’s Alo Aro Alo (2019). She has also published "The Theory and the Practice of the Performing Arts in Ancient India", in Sculpture, Painting, Terracottas, Performing Arts and Architecture, Vol. 8 of History of Ancient India, edited by Dilip K Chakrabarti (New Delhi: Vivekananda International Foundation and Aryan books International, 2020).

She designed and conducted a Value Added Course entitled "Rabindrasangeet Appreciation; Many Moods, Many Modes, Many Melodies", during the odd semester of 2023 (July - December). This course in which many celebrated personalities from the world of Rabindrasangeet Theory and Practice participated, highlighted the many dialogic interfaces of Rabindrasangeet. There was emphasis on how Hindustani Classical ragas, Baul epistemology, patriotism, Vaishnavism, Sufism and the Upanishads intersected and dialogized in the songs of Rabindranath Tagore.