Congratulations to Professor Nandini Das who has been awarded an OBE in this year's New Year Honours List. Professor Das was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and to Public Engagement.
Professor Das works on early modern literature, prose-fiction (chivalric romance, in particular), travel, migration, and cross-cultural encounters, and has published widely on these topics, from their appearance in the writings of major sixteenth and seventeenth century authors such as Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and Cervantes, to the fleeting presence of three Japanese boys in sixteenth century Portuguese-held Goa, India.
Her recent book Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire won the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and was shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize and the 2024 Wolfson History Prize.
Professor Das said: 'The arts and humanities are facing unprecedented challenges today. A record number of departments in the university sector are closing, and funding is being slashed. Around us, the future of our students and colleagues is in jeopardy, and critical scholarship and creative thinking are under threat. In a time of endless crises, when no choice is an easy choice, these fields are often seen as luxuries, their value quantified and questioned in favour of more 'practical' disciplines - ironically dooming the former to become the possession of a privileged few. And at the same time, the broader value of research, education, and human inquiry itself is being asked repeatedly to justify (and indeed, defend) itself in the current climate. Yet if this trend continues, we risk both the ability to understand ourselves, and the capacity to imagine and shape our future. In this context, the main value of this honour at this moment for me is that it is a recognition of the importance of these disciplines, and of research in general. Without them, we risk losing the very ability to ask why we matter, what it means to be human, and what it means to be a part of the planet we occupy.'
See which other members of the University of Oxford were awarded honours on the University website.
Stephen Fry, our current Visiting Professor of Creative Media, was knighted in the Honours List for services to mental health awareness, the environment and to charity. English Faculty alumnus Dr Tim Shortis, one of the Directors of Poetry by Heart, was awarded an MBE for services to education along with the competition's other Director, Dr Julie Blake.
