Professor Indranil Acharya is a professor and former Head of the Department of English Literature, Language, and Cultural Studies, Vidyasagar University. An alumnus of Purulia and Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission, Presidency College, and the University of Calcutta, Professor Acharya received the Indira Chatterjee Memorial Award and UGC NET-Junior Research Fellowship at different points in his academic career. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship (Research) in2024-2025 academic session. He had been to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, to pursue his research on the endangered folk performance traditions of South Asia. Dr Acharya has served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Delhi (2019-2020) and the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom (2024-2025). He is the Chief Editor of Janajati Darpan and Indigenous Wisdom, two international journals of Indigenous Studies. He has authored many books in diverse fields of knowledge. His books are: Beyond the Sense of Belonging: Race, Class and Gender in the Poetry of Yeats and Eliot (SSS Publications, 2011), Survival and Other Stories (Orient Blackswan, 2012), Many Coloured Glass (Macmillan, 2013), Towards Social Change: Essays on Dalit Literature (Orient Blackswan, 2014), Listen to the Flames (Oxford University Press, 2016), Paschimbanger Bhasha (Orient Blackswan, 2017), Smritibiloper Pore (Orient, 2017), The Languages of West Bengal (Orient Blackswan, 2019), Mahatma Gandhi in Bangla (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 2022), Geographical Imaginations: Literature and the Spatial Turn (Oxford University Press, 2022), The Almond Flowers and Other Stories (Orient Blackswan, 2022), Writings from the Sundarbans (Orient Blackswan, 2023), Selected Writings of Anil Gharai (Routledge, 2024).

Professor Indranil Acharya completed his doctoral research on the problematics of identity in the British Modernist poetry with special reference to W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Inspired by the anthropological interests of Yeats and Eliot, he took up active research in the domain of Indigenous Studies in 2005. He was also drawn to a comparative study of the Australian Aboriginal literature and completed a UGC MRP in 2008. He continued to explore the unrepresented literary traditions of the Dalit and Tribal communities of Eastern India as the Deputy Coordinator of a UGC-SAP-Departmental Research Support Scheme from 2009 to 2013. Later, he focused on the endangered folk performance traditions of Bengal and completed a UGC Major Research Project in 2015. Dr Acharya has been actively interested in Translation Studies, Minority Studies, Performance Studies, Endangered Language Studies, and Academic Social Responsibility for the last fifteen years. He is currently the Coordinator of the Centre for Translation and Foreign Language Studies at Vidyasagar University.