Malabika Sarkar
Mentor, TCG CREST
Professor Malabika Sarkar is Mentor, TCG CREST. Her role and responsibilities include providing mentorship to the senior leadership team in policy making, to help align the organizational structure of TCG CREST to its strategy and goals, and to provide guidance in shaping TCG CREST into a research-first university.
She was Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University, Delhi NCR, from 2019 to 2023 and Professor of English. As Principal Advisor and Professor of English at Ashoka University from 2015, she was additionally Ashoka’s first Dean of Faculty and Research (2016-2019) before becoming Vice-Chancellor in 2019.
She was First Vice-Chancellor of Presidency University in Kolkata (2011-14), responsible for the transition of the institution from Presidency College (established as Hindu College in 1817) to Presidency University.
She was earlier a Professor of English at Jadavpur University, a member of the University Council (1980-85), a panel member of NAAC, and member of other UGC committees.
An alumna of Cambridge University, later Visiting Fellow and Life Member of Clare Hall College, Cambridge, she was elected a Foundation Fellow at Clare Hall in 2025.
Primarily a Miltonist, her academic field is Early Modern Literature and the History of Science. Her other area of interest is Romantic Literature and culture and she was the Founder President of the Centre for Studies in Romantic Literature (CSRL) from 1994 to 2018, directing its annual international conferences for twenty five years. She has presented her work at various conferences in the UK and North America.
Her books include Cosmos and Character in Paradise Lost (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Moneta’s Veil: Essays on Nineteenth Century Literature (Delhi: Pearson, 2009), The Bengal Club in History (Kolkata: The Bengal Club, 2006) apart from book chapters and many scholarly articles in refereed journals. Book chapters include “Astronomical Signs in Paradise Lost” in Milton and the Ends of Time ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), “Milton’s Global Impact: India” in A New Companion to Milton ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), “Yeats, Kipling and the Haven-Finding Art” in Kipling and Yeats at 150 ed. Pramodini Varma and Anubhav Pradhan (Oxford & New York: Routledge 2019). Her article on “The Magic of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” published in Renaissance Studies, Vol.12, No.2, June 1988 was republished in Shakespeare Criticism Yearbook 1998 (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, 2000) in their “Selection of the Year’s Most Noteworthy Studies of William Shakespeare’s Plays and Poetry”.
She is an invited Fellow of the English Association (FEA), UK, and a member of the International Advisory Board of the journal European Romantic Review.
Since 2014, she is also President of the Women’s Coordinating Council (WCC), West Bengal, founded in 1960, the apex women’s organization in the state with more than 70 affiliated NGOs.