The department of English is thrilled to announce that Assistant Professor Amrita Dhar is the recipient of the Virginia Hull Research Award.

The Virginia Hull Research Award is given out by the College of Arts and Sciences annually to support “diversity at the university”. The recipient is awarded $2,500. The award hopes to give “particular attention to…female faculty members in the Humanities who are at the rank of assistant or associate professor.”

Dhar earned her BA and MA in English Literature at Jadavpur University, MPhil in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Cambridge and a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan. She teaches courses on early modern literature, disability studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, migration studies and the environmental humanities. Her teaching practices focus on her students’ intellectual growth and well-being.

Dhar has been the initiator, planner and main coordinator for Shakespeare in the “Post”Colonies, a collected volume of scholarly essays currently under contract with Bloomsbury, and “Shakespeare in Bengal,” special issue of the peer-reviewed open-access journal Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Additionally, she is working on a third and related project of a series of interviews with postcolonial Shakespearean creatives from around the world. The project will be hosted open-access on a website affiliated with Ohio State, and the site will go live by the end of summer 2023. Speaking on the impact of the award on her research, she says, “This award, with its focus on diversity and equity, is especially meaningful for the tenure progress of someone like me: an immigrant person of color, a new mother, and a junior faculty member at a large R-1 university.”

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Dhar for this recognition of her important work!