Contributors

Dr. Nishi Pulugurtha (Guest-Editor) is Head and Associate Professor, Department of English, Brahmananda Keshab Chandra College, Kolkata. She is an academic with varied interests and writes on travel, too.

Srirupa Dhar is Indian by birth and has been living in the United States since 1998. She has three Master’s degrees in English Literature. She completed her M.A. and M.Phil. from the University of Kolkata, India. She has a third Master’s degree in English with Technical Writing Certification from University of Alabama in Huntsville, U.S.A. Srirupa taught as a guest lecturer in the Department of English at Bethune College, Kolkata. She has also been a Middle School English teacher in Columbus, Ohio. She is a voracious reader and takes an avid delight in all genres of art. Occasionally, she acts in plays in Columbus and is part of an amateur dramatic society.

Dr. Nabanita Sengupta is assistant professor in English at Sarsuna College, affiliated to the University of Calcutta. Her areas of specialization are 19th century travel writings, women’s studies, translation studies, and disability studies. Some of her translated short stories have been published, the latest contribution being in the Anthology of Modern Bengali short stories published by the Sahitya Akademi. Her creative writings have also been published at various places like Muse India, NewsMinute.in, etc. She has also participated in various national and international seminars. She may be contacted at nabanita.sengupta@gmail.com

Dr. Usha Banerjee has a Ph. D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering. Her research areas include network security, intrusion detection, ad-hoc networks, privacy and secure computing. She is working as a Senior Scientific Officer in the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee) and is heading the SAP implementation project there. She is an avid cook and likes to experiment with recipes and writes about her experiences with them. Actively involved with CSR projects inside the IIT Roorkee campus, she pursues cooking as a hobby.

Ilakshee Bhuyan Nath is a writer based in New Delhi. She has worked on television and radio as a presenter, narrator for documentaries, trained corporate employees in effective communications. She has contributed travel articles for many journals, both print and digital. Most recently her short fictions have been included in Jaggery Lit and in two anthologies, The Best Asian Short Stories 2017 published by Singapore based Kitaab International Pvt Ltd and  The Others published by Storymirrors.

Sayan Aich Bhowmik is Assistant Professor of English at Shirakole College (affiliated to the University of Calcutta). When not under the burden of checking answer scripts and meeting deadlines, he can be found nurturing his love for watching movies and writing poetry. A published poet, he is also the editor of the blog, Plato’s Caves, a semi-academic space for discussion on life, culture, and literature.

Ketaki Datta is Associate Professor of English, Bidhannagar College, Kolkata. She is a novelist, reviewer, poet, translator, and editor of academic journals. Her book on Tennessee Williams has been well appreciated abroad. Her two novels have earned considerable attention. She is actively involved in research and has presented papers in India and abroad.

The world of arts and letters has had an abiding appeal for Debasri Basu since her childhood, and she, in turn, has devoted herself to it wholeheartedly. After completing higher education in English literature, she took up teaching as a profession and is currently an Assistant Professor at a Kolkata college. Work has commandeered the major chunk of her time, yet the call of the pen (or the keyboard, in recent years) is ineludible, and so she tries to maintain the habit of writing, which she picked up as a young girl. There is a blog where she posts, albeit not too regularly, most of her travelogues; a couple of social networking platforms too provide her with a forum to articulate her mental amblings. She does not vouch for their creative quotient, but the very process of writing is therapeutic for her and, therefore, held much dear.

Sohini Chatterjee holds an MA in International Relations from South Asian University, New Delhi. Her work has previously appeared in Kindle Magazine, Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, The Lookout Journal, Huffington Post India, etc. She writes and researches on gender, culture, and politics.

Amrita Mukherjee is the author of Exit Interview, published by Rupa Publications and Museum of Memories, a collection of 13 short stories, published by Readomania. Both the books are Starmark Bestsellers. She is currently a freelance journalist, who has held full-time posts in publications like The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, and The Asian Age in India and she was Features Editor at ITP Media Group, Dubai’s largest magazine house. She blogs at www.amritaspeaks.com

Dr. Sheila T. Cavanagh is Professor of English at Emory University. Founding-director of the World Shakespeare Project and Director of Emory’s Year of Shakespeare (2016-2017), she was recently Fulbright/Global Shakespeare Distinguished Chair in the UK. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in the Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, she has published widely in the fields of pedagogy and of Renaissance literature.

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University, South Australia. She is the co-editor of Matthew Flinders’ Private Journal (2005) and has published several articles on Flinders. In 2014, she was invited to give the Royal Society Matthew Flinders Memorial Lecture at the Royal Society of Victoria in Melbourne, and in September 2017 she gave a lecture on Flinders and Sir Joseph Banks at the Royal Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Gillian is also the editor of two electronic journals, and the author of books and articles on literary subjects from Jane Austen to JM Coetzee.

Dr. Mosarrap H Khan recently completed his doctorate at the Department of English, New York University, USA. He is a founding-editor at Café Dissensus. Email: mosarraphossainkhan@gmail.com. Twitter: @mosarrapkhan

Anagha Babu is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at the Central University of Kerala. She is faculty member at the Muvattupuzha Centre of Kerala State Civil Services Academy, functioning as part of the Kerala State Centre for Continuing Education, Kerala.

Himanshi Sharma is an independent scholar. She finished her MPhil in 2017 from Department of English, University of Delhi. Her research interests include Partition Literature, Visual Studies, and Indian Writing in English.

Ankita Das is a PhD Research Scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Guwahati, Assam.

Dr. Nishat Haider is Professor of English and Director, Institute of Women’s Studies, at the University of Lucknow. She is the author of Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry (2010). Recipient of Meenakshi Mukherji Prize (2016), C. D. Narasimhaiah Award (2010), and Isaac Sequeira Memorial Award (2011), she has presented papers at numerous academic conferences and her essays have been included in a variety of international journals and books. She has conducted numerous workshops on gender budgeting and gender sensitization. She has lectured extensively on subjects at the cusp of cinema, culture, and gender studies. Her research interests include Postcolonial Studies, Popular Culture, Cinema, and Gender Studies.

Arundhati Sethi has completed her Masters in English Literature (Honors with Research) from Mumbai University in 2016. Her Master’s thesis focused on the twin Partition films by the diasporic film-maker, Anup Singh. Her research interests include Postcolonial and Diaspora studies. She has briefly flirted with middle school English teaching and is also pursuing the classical dance of Odissi.

Raeesa Usmani is a Teaching Assistant at the Department of Biotechnology, Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, Gujarat, India. A Gold Medalist in M. A. in English Literature and Language at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, she received her M. Phil degree on Travel Writing. She is currently working for a doctorate. She has published poems and research papers in journals and has presented papers in national and international conferences. Her areas of interest include Travel Writing, Applied Linguistics, English Language Teaching, Gender Studies, Translation Studies, and Partition Literature.

Sridhi Dash is a research scholar at the Department of English, Ravenshaw University, Cuttack, India, currently engaged in researching Illness as a Metaphor, and is interested in Travel writing and rehabilitation studies.

Photo: Tourist Companies

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For more stories, read Café Dissensus Everyday, the blog of Café Dissensus Magazine.