Shormishtha Panja retired as Professor of English at the University of Delhi, where she served as Head, Department of English; Dean, Faculty of Arts; and Joint Director, Institute of Lifelong Learning. She received her BA in English (Hons.) from Presidency College Calcutta, her MA from Jadavpur University, and her PhD from Brown University where she was awarded the Jean Starr Untermeyer Fellowship. She has taught at Stanford University and IIT Delhi. Her areas of interest are Renaissance studies, Shakespeare in India, gender studies, feminism in India, and visual culture.

Her books include Sidney, Spenser and the Royal Reader (2017), Performing Shakespeare in India: Exploring Indianness, Literatures and Cultures (2016), Shakespeare and Class (2014), Shakespeare and the Art of Lying (2013), Word Image Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture (2009) and Signifying the Self: Women and Literature (2004). She has published articles on Renaissance studies in the international journals and collections English Literary Renaissance, Journal of Narrative Technique and Shakespeare International Yearbook besides several essays in Renaissance collections published by Ashgate. She has been invited to contribute to the Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopaedia and the Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre.

She has been a Fellow at the Salzburg Seminar, a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and has been awarded a Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, and the Mayers Fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. She has been invited to lecture on Shakespeare in India and Indian Feminism at universities in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia. She has been President, Shakespeare Society of India, from 2008 to 2014. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the international group of Early Modern scholars, Theater without Borders. She is also the founder member of PEHEL: Delhi University Women's Support Group, formed in 2005.