Debapriya Basu is Assistant Professor in English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. She did her graduate and postgraduate studies in English at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. She was Research Fellow of the School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR), Jadavpur University. She joined the SCTR when it was founded in 2003 as a Project Fellow fresh out of postgraduate studies and has worked as one of the School’s fellows when not reading for an MPhil and a PhD degree in the poetry of English women writers of the Renaissance from Jadavpur University. Her MPhil dissertation is titled Elusive Presences: A Study of the Poetry of Isabella Whitney (2007). Her PhD thesis is Other Voices, Other Selves: Problems of Identity and Selfhood in Some women Poets of the English Renaissance (2012) and studies the poetry of Anne Vaughan Locke, Isabella Whitney and Anne Dowriche. She was awarded an Inlaks Research Travel Grant to the UK in 2011 as visiting scholar at King’s College, London, which enabled her to wrap up her PhD thesis with some satisfyingly solid primary references. She has always been interested in the texts produced by Renaissance women writers, especially those of the comparatively lesser-known writers of sixteenth-century England. This abiding fascination, among other things, is the explanation for the choice of text for this edition.
The chosen format for this edition is largely a result of the editor’s long association with the SCTR. Beginning with training in documentation, bibliography and the handling of primary materials, her digital skills have evolved with the needs of the SCTR’s myriad archival and documentary projects. She was responsible for the electronic bibliography of the Bichitra Online Variorum and prepared the Master List of all the manuscript and printed variants of Tagore’s texts. She has overseen the preparation of the preliminary TEI-XML encoding of the 1878 University College Dublin manuscript of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native for a Thomas Hardy knowledge site project by Professor Tim Dolin of Curtin University. She has also given seminars and workshops on electronic textual editing and has taught TEI-XML in the SCTR’s Postgraduate Diploma Course in Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics.