Education
He was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and the University of Oxford.
He was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and the University of Oxford.
He taught at Presidency College from January 1973 to December 1991 and at Jadavpur University from December 1991 till his retirement in June 2010. He also held the post of Professor Emeritus at Jadavpur University. Sukanta Chaudhuri works in the fields of European Renaissance studies, translation, and textual studies.
His first major monograph Infirm Glory: Shakespeare and the Renaissance Image of Manitoba (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) was republished in 2006 by District of Columbia Publishers.
He has authored Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), edited selections of Francis Bacon’s Essays and of Elizabethan poetry for Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, and edited or co-edited several collections of essays on the Renaissance: most recently Shakespeare without English (New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2006). He has also worked on the links and parallels between the European and the Bengal Renaissances, to examine the possibility of a common model of a ‘Renaissance’.
Currently, he is preparing the third Arden Shakespeare edition of A Midsummer Night"s Dream. He is General Editor of the Oxford Tagore s (five volumes published between 2000 and 2006).
He has also authored and Understanding (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1999).
Over the last few years, he has researched, lectured and written widely on textual studies and editorial theory. His book The Metaphysics of Text combines the insights of traditional bibliography and textual criticism with recent editorial theory and theories of language in a new way. He is also involved with new areas of activity in recording, editing and analyzing Indian texts and records.
At Jadavpur University, he was among the chief founders of the School of Cultural Texts and Records, and had been its Director from 2004 to 2010.
Some of the projects of which he was the Principal Investigator were on archiving "popular market" books, creating a digital archive of early Bengali drama and creating an online variorum of the works of Rabindranath Tagore. Chaudhuri is interested in urban studies.
He edited the major two-volume compilation Calcutta: The Living City (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1990). He writes and campaigns extensively on urban issues, especially concerning his native city, Kolkata.
In early 2007 Chaudhuri"s Bengali play Jaha Chai was performed in Calcutta by the Nandikar theatre group under the direction of Rudra Prasad Sengupta.
This was part of a project on cultural mobility carried out by the scholar Stephen Greenblatt and the off-Broadway dramatist Charles L. Mee. Chaudhuri Indianised the idea and set the story in modern Bengal, with Bengali and Adivasi characters, the lost play metamorphosing into a (fictional) hitherto unknown Tagore text.
