Member Secretary

Prof. Dhananjay Singh

Address

Indian Council of Social Science Research
JNU Institutional Area
Aruna Asaf Ali Marg
New Delhi-110067
E-mail: ms[at]icssr[dot]org
Telephone: 011-26741833,011-26742059 (O)

Prof. Dhananjay Singh is the Member Secretary, Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi. He graduated in English from Government College, Itanagar, Arunachal University, in 1995, and did his M.A in English from Arunachal University, Itanagar, in 1997. He was awarded the Gold Medal by the University for his excellent academic performance during his MA. He completed his M.Phil. and Ph.D. research in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 2003 and 2007 respectively. His research was in the domain of literary and cultural studies.

Prof. Singh started his teaching career at Sri Aurobindo College, University of Delhi, in August-September 2006 and thereafter taught at Satyawati College, University of Delhi from September 2006 to December 2007. He joined the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, as a faculty in 2007, and headed the centre as its Chairperson from January 2019 to January 2023. He served as the Associate Dean of the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies from May 2021 to January 23, 2023. He also served as Associate Dean of Students, JNU, (November 2017 to September 2019) and Chief Proctor of JNU (November 2019 to May 2021). He served as the Warden at Chandrabhaga Hostel, Jawaharlal Nehru University (September 2010 to May 2017).

Early in his teaching and research career, Prof. Singh worked, as Assistant Editor, in the prestigious project titled The Encyclopedia of Indian Poetics, with Dr. Kapil Kapoor as the Chief Editor, a project of Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, & Union Academique Internationale (UAI), Brussels. He was also Assistant Editor, with Dr. Kapil Kapoor as the Chief Editor, of Mutual Regards: Indo-Irish Anthology, a collaborative project involving Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the University of Ulster at Colerain (Ireland).

Prof. Singh has taught MA and PhD courses in JNU on Research Methodology; Sanskrit Poetics; Comparative Poetics; English Literary Criticism; Life, Literature and Thought-19th Century; Indian Aesthetics; Indian Philosophy of Language; Bharata’s Natyashastra, Anandavardhan’s Dhvanyaloka; South Asian Fiction; Canadian Fiction; Creative Writing; Irish Drama; and Irish Poetry and Fiction. He has supervised 23 PhD theses and 20 M.Phil. dissertations.

Prof. Singh has been invited to deliver talks and present papers in national and international conferences by prestigious institutes and universities in India as well as outside India such as University of Tubingen, Germany, University of Wurzburg, Germany, University of Grenoble, France, etc. Several of his research papers on language, literature, and other areas of cultural studies have been published by prestigious publications such as Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature, Sahitya Akademi, and Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla.

Prof. Singh is the author of the monographs Fables in the Indian Narrative Tradition: An Analytical Study (D.K. Printworld, 2011),The Poetics of Theatre in Early India (D.K. Printworld, 2021) and the forthcoming Philosophy of Performance in India (Bloomsbury).

Prof. Singh has been Visiting Professor at University of Bergamo, Italy; International Visiting Fellow at Grinnell College, Grinnell, IOWA, USA; and Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin. For his research on Seamus Heaney and Buddhist epistemology in a comparative framework, he was awarded Research Secondment by the European Union’s Marie Curie International Research Exchange Scheme to the Project “Social Performance, Cultural Trauma and Reestablishing Solid Sovereignties (SPECTRESS),” at Trinity College Dublin in May-July 2017.

Prof. Singh’s poems have appeared in literary journals Muse India and South Asian Ensemble.

Presently, Prof. Singh is the President of the Association of Asian Social Science Research Councils (AASSREC). He represented the country at the 42nd General Conference on Social and Human Sciences (SHS) of UNESCO, at UNESCO, Paris. He also participated in the Global Forum on Ethics of Artificial Intelligence organised by UNESCO in collaboration with the Government of Slovenia at Brdo, Slovenia.

He is also serving as the Director (Additional Charge) of the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language, New Delhi.

List of former Member Secretaries