Lady Caplan, Chair

Joyce Caplan is a Teaching Fellow at University of Edinburgh and a member of the General Council. Chair of several NGO’s including Poetry Association of Scotland, Children’s Classic Concerts and the medical Charity The Snowball Trust. Also a Board member of  The  Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society, ScottishPEN, The Edinburgh Burns Council, The Muriel Spark Society.

Lord Bruce, Vice Chair

Charles Bruce is active in the not-for-profit sector in conservation, the fine arts, and multiculturalism. He manages a family estate in Fife as a sustainable rural business centred on Broomhall House, an international destination and events venue. He chairs the Kolkata Scottish Heritage Trust which is restoring the historic Scottish cemetery in Kolkata (Calcutta) as an exemplar of urban regeneration.

He is president of the Democracy Forum, which hosts regular seminars in London on human rights and political authority in several Asian countries including China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Myanmar. As patron of the Japan Society of Scotland he is a regular visitor to Japan.

As a former chairman of the Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland he contributed to the appreciation of the fine arts by raising funds for the national collection. He is also involved in conservation of the built environment and helped establish the Scottish Lime Centre at Charlestown on the family estate, as Scotland’s leading training hub for masonry skills.

Educated at the universities of St Andrews and Dundee, he studied Economic History and Sustainable Urban Design. He is on the advisory council of the International Academic Forum (IAFOR), based in Osaka, and serves on the board of the Asia Scotland Institute. He is deputy chairman of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies and contributes to the journal, Gitanjali and Beyond.

Nandini Sen, Secretary

Dr Nandini Sen, PhD, is an independent researcher (Social Anthropology) affiliated to organisations like Centre for South Asian Studies (University of Edinburgh) and Intercultural Research Centre (Heriot Watt University). Her book Urban Marginalisation in South Asia: Waste Pickers in Calcutta was first published by Routledge/ Taylor and Francis in 2018. In 2020 it has come back in paperback. It focuses on marginalisation and environmental well-being. It is now placed in 74 renowned libraries including British Library and National Library of Scotland.

Her paper Women and Gender in Short Stories by Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthropological Introspection on Kinship and Family was published in Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (2016) where she has significantly compared Tagore’s role in education and women’s emancipation with Scottish educationist and environmentalist Patrick Geddes’s work.

Neil Fraser, Treasurer

Neil Fraser is retired from being Senior Lecturer, School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh. He has published several academic books and articles and is the author of ‘Social Security through Guaranteed Employment, India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act’ Social Policy and Administration, Nov. 2015 and a contributor and advisor to A Confluence of Minds The Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes Reader on Education and Environment (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2018).

Gari Donn

Dr Gari Donn, PhD is the Founder and Executive Director of UN House Scotland, Chair of the UN Association Edinburgh and Hon Fellow of the University of Edinburgh.  She has extensive research experience and publications on Education in the Middle East and in Commonwealth Countries, having held the post of Advisor for Higher Education at the Commonwealth Secretariat.

Her publications include:  Education in the Broader Middle East: borrowing a baroque arsenal  Symposium Books: Oxford 2013; Globalisation and Higher Education in the Arab Gulf States Symposium Books: Oxford 2010; Parliament, SEED and the Administration of Scottish Education’ in Bryce T. & Humes W. (eds) Scottish Education After Devolution (vol 3) Chapter 11, 113-122 Edinburgh University Press 2008

Gari has current collaborations with universities in India (Jindal Global University Law School and Ashoka University) and Pakistan (Aga Khan University, Karachi) as well as in South Africa, Canada, Oman (Sultan Qaboos University), China (Zhe Jiang Normal University (ZJNU), Linyi Normal University and Beijing Normal University), and Japan (Tokyo University). Since 1995, Gari has been a Justice of the Peace for the City of Edinburgh, Lothian and Borders JP Courts

Mridula Chakraborty

Dr Mridula Chakraborty, PhD, MBE has worked over thirty years as a chartered engineer and business consultant, involved in a wide variety of high-profile Innovation Projects. She has worked indefatigably in the community promoting Art and Culture and in supporting and managing socio-cultural activities serving Indians in and around Glasgow. She is a founder member of the Bengali Cultural Association established in 1971 to eliminate isolation of Indian Bengalis and saving them from Social Exclusion and promoting cultural heritage. She has been General Secretary and President of the Bangiya Sanskritik Parishad (Bengali Cultural Association), Glasgow, she is General Secretary of the Association for the Indian Organisation (AIO), on the Board of directors of the Peace Arts (a charitable performing arts and cultural organisation), a Committee member of East Renfrewshire Interfaith Group,  Committee member of ‘Women Across the world’, the Glasgow Hindu Mandir and SEMSA (Scottish Ethnic Minority Sports Association, on the Board of Desi Bravehearts, promoting Indian classical  dance and music and is a member of East Renfrewshire Interfaith Forum

Her awards include Hind Rattan Award  (2008) by NRII (Non-Resident Indian) Welfare,  Achievement award in Education (2009) from AIO contribution in the field of education in Science and Engineering and Social Cohesion and House of Lords award (2010) as a Global Non-resident Indian award for contribution to British Society in the field of Science and Engineering. She is the Chair of the Tagore Centre, Glasgow Branch based at Mitchell Library.

Murdo Macdonald

Dr Murdo Macdonald is Emeritus Professor of History of Scottish Art (University of Dundee). He is author of Scottish Art in Thames and Hudson’s World of Art series. He is a former editor of Edinburgh Review. His book Patrick Geddes’s Intellectual Origins was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020. He was appointed an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 2009, and an honorary fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies in 2016.

Steve Hillier

Professor Stephen Gilbert Hillier OBE is Emeritus Professor of Reproductive Endocrinology and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Medical Research Council Centre for Reproductive Health, University of Edinburgh Medical School. His career at the University of Edinburgh spans over 30 years as researcher, teacher, postgraduate director, honorary consultant clinical scientist and senior academic leader. As Vice-Principal International, he led the University of Edinburgh’s internationalisation strategy ‘Edinburgh Global’, from 2008 to 2014. He was awarded an OBE in the 2015 New Year’s Honours list for contributions to international higher education.

Anindya Raychaudhuri

Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri, PhD is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK. He is the author of two monographs, Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and Narrating South Asian Partition: Oral History, Literature, Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2019). In 2016, he was named one of the BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers. His research interests include critical theory and Marxism, postcolonial studies, and memory studies. He is currently working on a cultural history of vertigo.

Sourit Bhattacharya

Dr Sourit Bhattacharya, PhD, is a Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his BA and MA degrees in English literature from Presidency College and Jadavpur University, and his MPhil degree in Social Sciences from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He received his PhD in English and comparative literary studies from the University of Warwick (2017) for a thesis on environmental catastrophe and socio-political crisis in postcolonial Indian literatures. His first monograph based on the dissertation involving a reading of novels by Bhabani Bhattacharya, Mahasweta Devi, Nayantara Sahgal, Salman Rushdie, and Rohinton Mistry was published by Palgrave in 2020. Sourit’s research and teaching interests include colonial and postcolonial studies; world-literature; famine and food studies; modern Bengali literature; and critical theory. These interests can be reflected in his second monograph on Postcolonialism Now (Orient BlackSwan, 2023) and a co-edited volume on the Bengali author, Nabarun Bhattacharya (Bloomsbury, 2020). Sourit is currently working on two projects: on the literary and cultural works of the 1943 Bengal famine; and on radical literary networks that interrogated the ‘worldness’ of literary form in late-colonial Bengal. Sourit is a co-founding editor of Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry and an advisory or editorial board member of the Edwin Morgan Trust, English, Gitanjali and Beyond, and New Literaria.

Bashabi Fraser, Director

Dr Bashabi Fraser, CBE, HonFASL, is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing (Edinburgh Napier University, Honorary Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, the University of Edinburgh and Editor in Chief of the ScoTs journal, Gitanjali and Beyond. Her publications include Patient Dignity (2021), Rabindranath Tagore, a critical biography (2019), Scottish Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Continuum of Ideas, Co-Ed., (2017), A Confluence of Minds: the Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes Reader on Education and the Environment, Co-Ed., (2017) and A Meeting of Two Minds, the Geddes-Tagore Letters (2005; 4th Rvd Edn in press). Bashabi is an Honorary Vice President and Honorary Fellow of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS) and is on the Board of ScottishPEN. She is the Director of ScoTs.

Mr Alex Dunedin, Technical Manager

Director of Ragged University and Social Server.