About Colleen

Born in Toronto, Canada, Colleen received her B.A. (Hons.) and M.A. in Slavic Studies from the University of Toronto and her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Columbia University, New York. Her contributions to the field include articles and reviews on interwar Polish literature and many translations from Polish and Russian, including Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism.

After teaching at Roosevelt University she joined Institute of Gas Technology, an energy research institute that at the time was affiliated with Illinois Institute of Technology. She was hired as an editor, and over the years held various editorial, policy and managerial positions.

Throughout her career Colleen continued free lance writing on such topics as chess, dogs, travel and food, encouraged by her husband, Ashish. His late mother, Arati Sen, was a well-known Indian writer whose column in the Bengali journal Desh was one of the most widely read in India.

Colleen’s articles have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times, Christian Science Monitor, Toronto Globe and Mail, Travel and Leisure, Food Arts, Yoga International, and elsewhere. In 1998 she began attending the Oxford Symposia on Food and Cookery in the U.K. and has become a regular participant.

Her latest book is The Bloomsbury Handbook of Indian Cuisine (with Sourish Bhattacharyya and Helen Saberi (Bloomsbury, 2023). Learn more about this and the rest of her books here.