Dr Poulomi Das is a culture and performance studies scholar, trained in English literature and
translation, who has worked intimately in the community and conducted extensive ethnographic documentation in the mangroves of the Bay of Bengal (on the Indian side) while writing her PhD thesis, “The Bonbibi Cult of Sundarbans: Expressions and Expectations in the Performances of Everyday Life” at the School of Arts and Aesthetics (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi). Her MPhil thesis titled, “Source, Filter and Target texts: A case study of two Badal Sirkar’s texts” was tri-lingual research analyzing the politics of language that goes into the translation of play-texts from Bengali to Hindi to English as the works ascend the hierarchically positioned language structures in the Indian language-scape while undergoing the process of transmutation. She is deeply invested in understanding how words “perform” and hence experiments in her classrooms with multi-lingual, multi-modal care-infused pedagogical strategies.
Her Critical Writing course at the YIF aims to channelize our unique South-Asian positionality and its diverse socio-linguistic repertoire to help us consciously engage with our multiple truths and to explicate that we are all inadvertent subject to the politics of language. The theme of her course, “Politics of Language and Multilingualism”, approaches critical writing from a three-pronged disciplinary perspective drawing from Linguistics, Translation Studies and Culture Studies.
Poulomi has been an educator for more than a decade now who has been curating courses and facilitating classes & workshops related to Research/Academic Writing and Critical Pedagogy, English for Academic Purposes & Communication Skills for heterogeneous classrooms at Visva Bharati University, Tata Consultancy Services, Haldia Institute of Technology, Jamia Millia Islamia, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Ambedkar University, Ashoka University and IGNOU. Prior to joining the YIF, she was a Senior Writing Fellow at the Centre of Writing and Communication (CWC), Ashoka University for the last two years. When not teaching, she is either eating (an epicure at heart), gardening, doing Yoga or backpacking in some remote location where internet or phone signal wouldn’t break her reverie.
