Prof. Sunanda Mahajan

Sunanda Mahajan is Professor of German, and Head of the Department of Foreign Languages, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India and is presently in Göttingen as visiting faculty under GIP (Germanistische Institutspartnerschaft) at the Department of Intercultural German Studies, Göttingen. During her teaching and research stay of two months she has offered a block seminar on the topic Forms of Violence in Image and Text (Formen der Gewalt in Bild und Text) in which she is working with Indian short films, theoretical texts and German literary texts. Her research project deals with comparative study of histories of European literatures from 18^th century onward with special focus on German, French, Russian and Spanish literature.   

She has been working at the Savitribai Phule Pune University (formerly known as University of Pune) for last more than 30 years, is recipient of DAAD – fellowship, Euro-Pacific Fellowship of ÖAD and others. Her topic of doctoral research was a comparative study of German and Marathi contemporary women’s literature. Her later research dealt with Holocaust literature, autobiographical writings by women, Family Histories written by women. As far as teaching is concerned she is engaged with the areas literary criticism, history of literature and literature studies.

She is co-compiler of a trilingual dictionary Marathi- Russian-German (published in Pune 2013), which was an outcome of a major research project. The dictionary has around 540 pages, more than 6000 Marathi entry words, with equivalent meanings – denotative and connotative – with usages in both the target languages Russian and German.  It is a learner’s dictionary.

Apart from teaching, Sunanda Mahajan has contributed to the field of translation by translating literary texts from German into Marathi (for example Die Liebhaberinnen von Elfriede Jelinek (Marathi Translation 2012), Sommerhaus , später von Judith Hermann (Marathi Translation 2015), Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg von Arturo Ui von Bertolt Brecht ( Marathi Translation 2016)).  The Marathi translations of David Wagner’s Leben and Thomas Melle’s Die Welt im Rücken will be published soon.

She is Co- founder and belongs to the editorial team of a Marathi translation quarterly called Kelyane Bhashantar since January 1999, and has also published many translated texts like stories, poems and other shorter texts for the quarterly. She has received a few awards for her work in the field of translation for example Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad’s Rekha Dhole Anuwad Puraskar, i.e.  Maharashtra Literature Organization’s prize for translation (co-sponsored by Rajhans Publishing House, Pune) 2017.