Prem Poddar appointed Vice Chancellor of Darjeeling Hill University

KalimNews, Kalimpong, 10 March 2023: Professor Prem Poddar is appointed Vice Chancellor as successor of Prof Om Prakash Mishra the present Vice Chancellor of Darjeeling Hill University. Prof Poddar is appointed for an interim period of three months from the date of his joining. 

Prem Poddar is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University of Manchester and invitee Professor of University of North Bengal. He was Professor in Cultural Encounters at Rosklide University in Denmark for a decade. He has been an Humboldt Senior Fellow, AHRC Fellow at Southampton and Carlsberg Fellow at Cambridge University. He has taught in India, Britain, and Denmark as Associate Professor in Postcolonial Studies. 

Grew up in Kalimpong, Prof Poddar lived in London most of his life, and also in Copenhagen, Aarhus, Kolkata, Shanghai and Berlin. 

He was a visiting Professor at Fudan University in China, Confucius Senior Fellow in Shanghai and visiting Professor in Heidelberg University.

He is the author of many articles and books including Violent Civilities (2002) and Postkolonial Contra-modernitet: Immigration, Identitet, Historie (2004). He has also edited Translating Nations (2000), A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Thought (2005/2008), Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (2007/2010); A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures —Continental Europe and its Empires (2008/2011) and Gorkhas Imagined (2009). His forthcoming series of articles and a monograph investigate India-China relations through the lens of a border town across the Himalayas. He also has published an article on his project "AT THE CHINA-INDIA BORDER: HIMALAYAN KALIMPONG", "Kalimpong as Fiction or Ethnography? Gorkha/Nepali Sensitivities in the Himalayas"

His continuing interest in ‘state’ and ‘nation’ as conceptual contexts for analyzing cultural representation forms the centre of his work  on the politics of the passport.