New generation thinker tells tales of English encounters

Nandini Das , a senior lecturer from the School of English , is one of the winners of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and BBC Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers Scheme. The scheme is a nationwide search for the brightest academic minds with the potential to turn their ideas into fascinating broadcasts. Das, whose research focuses on travel and memory in the Age of Discovery in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, will be exploring the stories of the very first English encounters with the Middle East and Asia. She said: "This is a crucial time, when England was not only establishing its colonies in the New World of the Americas, but also making its first formal political and mercantile with what it saw as the real superpowers of the 'old world', such as the Ottoman and Mughal empires. "I want to tell the story of this period through the lives and adventures of the ordinary English people who got caught up in the current of that great surge of exploration. Their stories of friendships, fear, misunderstandings and interchange have rarely been told before. But they have to power to make us rethink our ideas of how the English made their place on the global stage." Das has been recently awarded an AHRC Early Career Fellowship, a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship and the Renaissance Society of America's Paul Oskar Kristeller research grant for her work.