Bengal and Italy: Transcultural Encounters from the Mid-19th to the Early 21st Century

It is a collection of 10 essays on the transcultural encounter between Bengal and Italy from the late 19 & 20th century. It explores the largely unknown features of a multifaceted dialogue in the fields of literature, music, architecture, art, cinema, diplomacy, entrepreneurship, travels, education and intellectual engagement.

Paromita Chakravarti is Professor, Department of English, and has been the Director of the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She completed her doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, UK. She teaches Renaissance drama, women’s writing, sexuality and film studies. Her work in the School of Women’s Studies has focused on education and sexuality. Her edited book is Women Contesting Culture: Changing Frames of Gender Politics in India (2012) and co-edited books are Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: ’Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas’ (2018) and Asian Interventions in Global Shakespeare: ’All the World’s His Stage’ (2021).

Mario Prayer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History of India at Sapienza University of Rome. His research interests focus on the political and cultural history of 20th-century Bengal, Indo-Italian relations in the inter-war period, Mahatma Gandhi’s reconstruction movement and the Panchayats in West Bengal. He is the author of The ’Gandhians’ of Bengal: Nationalism, Social Reconstruction and Cultural Orientations 1920-1942 (2001) and has translated works by Rabindranath Tagore and Manik Bandopadhyay from the original Bengali into Italian.