Sukanta Chaudhuri, professor emeritus at Jadavpur University (JU), has been elected a Fellow of The British Academy.

The academy, incorporated in 1902, is a fellowship of around 1,300 of the world’s leading academics elected by peers for distinction in the humanities and social sciences.

The other fellows elected this year from outside the UK include political scientist and theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta and the US-based literary theorist and feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

A teacher at the JU department of English, Chaudhuri has a wide area of scholarship — thought and literature of the European Renaissance, Shakespeare and Early Modern English literature, textual studies, translation and translation studies as well as Rabindranath Tagore and digital humanities which find combined expression in the Bichitra website, a database of Tagore’s complete works. His name features on the academy’s website under the specialisation of early modern languages and literatures to 1830.

“I feel privileged and reassured that my life's work on a variety of subjects has found international recognition,” he told The Telegraph.

Other living India-based fellows of the academy include sociologist Andre Beteille and historian Romila Thapar.