Dr Sourit Bhattacharya (on research leave)

Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures

Biography

Background

I am a Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Edinburgh. I received my PhD at the University of Warwick and have previously taught at the universities of Calcutta, Warwick, Glasgow, and IIT Roorkee, India. My research and supervision interests include colonial and postcolonial studies, South Asian literatures and cultures, environmental and disaster studies, famine and food studies, and materialist theories.

I am on research leave in 2024-25 and will be checking emails infrequently during this period.

Qualifications

PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick

MPhil in Social Sciences, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Jadavpur University

MA in English, Jadavpur University

BA (Hons) in English Literature, Presidency College, University of Calcutta

Responsibilities & affiliations

Programme Director and Cohort Lead, MSc in Comparative Literature

Student Engagement Officer, 2022-2023

Postgraduate teaching

Spring 2024:

Programme Director and Cohort Lead: MSc in Comparative Literature

Course convenor and seminar tutor: Theories and Methods of Literary Study II 

Seminar Tutor: Literature and Modernity II

Lecture:

Novel (1B); Theory (2B)

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Autumn 2023:

Course convenor: Commodities of Empire: Colonialism, Ecology, Culture

Course convenor and Seminar Tutor: Theories and Methods of Literary Study I

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Spring 2023:

Programme Director: MSc in Comparative Literature

Seminar Tutor:

Literature and Modernity II

Theories and Methods of Literary Study II

Lecture:

Novel (1B); Criticism (2B)

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Autumn 2022

Course convenor: Commodities of Empire: Colonialsim, Ecology, Culture

Seminar Tutor: Theories and Methods of Literary Study I

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Spring 2022:

MSc

Theories and Methods of Literary Study II

Literature and Modernity II

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I am interested in guiding PhD projects that fall broadly within my research areas which include colonial and postcolonial including South Asian and minority ethnic Scottish literatures and cultures; environmental humanities, disaster studies, and postcolonial ecocriticism; world literature from the margins; race and antiracism; diaspora, migration, and postcolonial nationhood; caste and subaltern theories; global modernisms; and Marxist critical theory.

Current PhD students supervised

Marianna Golunucci (Glasgow): Anti-racism and Scottish women writers and activists

Past PhD students supervised

For three terms:

Shruti Shukla (Glasgow): African American and Dalit female writers

Laura Scott (Glasgow): Scottish minority ethnic writers

Research summary

My research lies at the intersections of empire, postcolonial, food, and environmental discourses. I am interested in understanding how literary and artistic representations of disasters (especially famines and slow violence such as food poverty) in the colonial, postcolonial, and postimperial worlds reveal complex social dynamics and structural inequalities. My first book, 'Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism' (Palgrave, 2020), shortlisted for the University English First Book Prize 2022, explored these questions through a close reading of the novels of three catastrophic events from late-colonial and postcolonial India: 1943 Bengal Bengal Famine, the Naxalbari Movement, and the Indian Emergency.

I followed these questions with a couple of research projects. A Carnegie Research Incentive Grant helped me to explore the literary and cultural works of the 1943 Bengal famine which would result in an online annotated bibliography of the works. A Royal Society of Edinburgh Network Award on the British empire, Scotland, and Indian famines brought scholars and public bodies in the UK and India together in three conferences and two public-facing events in Scotland and India to interrogate colonialism's role in 'making' and preventing famines in India, and how these famines fuelled anticolonial nationalist writings and campaigns, details here: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/rseaward_indianfamines/.

These interests have also led me to co-found a Food Sovereignty Research Network at the University of Glasgow, which I am now affiliated to, and which works on how local food growing and distributions initiatives aim to tackle food poverty challenges of the twenty first century metropolis. I am additionally interested in food banks and their cultural recepion among ethnic minority communities. Webpage here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/arts/research/artslab/ourlabs/foodsovereignty/

My other interest lies in reading postcolonial and world literatures from an anticolonial and materialist perspective. My second monograph, 'Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising' (Orient BlackSwan, Nov 2024) reads literary and cultural texts -- poetry, theatre, novel, film, documentary, graphic novel, non-fiction from post-colonial geographies in the last decades -- to offer a new method of reading which it calls 'reading for decolonising'. The book argues that the overwhelming nature of theory in the field has often relegated reading literary texts closely and comparatively through the lens of struggle and resistance to the margin. This book is aimed at students and scholars interested in 'doing' postcolonial literature from an anticolonial lens. 

I have cognate interest in the field of postcolonial and vernacular world literatures from the perspective of translation studies. How do we read 'vernacular' or untranslated literatures and 'local' literary networks in late colonial/mid-20thC India which actively participated in contemporary world-literary dialogues but are not widely known (i.e., translated in major European languages and/or published by major Euro-American presses)? Is there a world-form (uneven and coeval) in peripheral literatures? I have addressed some of the these questions in a co-edited volume on the radical Indian-Bengali writer, Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2020). I'm currently collaborating with Dr Arka Chattopadhyay, IIT Gandhinagar, on a planned journal special issue on coeval global modernism, and sole-editing a special issue on Mahasweta Devi from a postcolonial ecological perspective.

Forthcoming publications:

  • Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2024. Monograph.
  • “Plants in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Indian Writings”, in Bonnie Lander Johnson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Plants (Cambridge UP), 2024.
  • "“World-Ecology, Peasant Resistance, and Catastrophic Realism in Victorian India: Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan (1860)” in Catastrophe, Crisis, and Responsive Literature in India: In Search of Commons. Eds. Dhritiman Chakraborty, Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty and Mukunda Mishra. Cham: Springer, Nov 2024.
  • “Postcolonial Civil War, Compound Disaster, and Imaginative Recovery: Cinema and Literature of the Bangladesh War of Liberation” in Kerstin Oloff, Treasa DeLoughrey, Claire Westall, and Sharae Deckard eds., The Routledge Companion to Literature and the  Environment (Routledge), 2024

Knowledge exchange

1/ Public Lecture on

“Climax of the Clearances: The Great Highland Famine and Scottish History”

Speaker: Prof Sir Thomas Devine, University of Edinburgh

5pm-7pm, 23rd May 2023

Usha Kasera Lecture Theatre, Old College, University of Edinburgh

Details here: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/rseaward_indianfamines/events/  

 

2/ "80 years of the 1943 Bengal Famine: Remembering through Talks and Events"

A series of public engagement events on the topic in Kolkata, Jan 5-8, 2024.

Details here: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/rseaward_indianfamines/events/  

Current project grants

Carnegie Research Incentive Grant (RIG009840): Representing the 1943 Bengal Famine: Colonialism, Food Crisis, Culture (July 2021 till Sep 2022)

Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Network Award (69777): The British Empire, Scotland, and Indian Famines: Writings on Food Crisis in Colonial India (March 2022 till March 2024)

Organiser

I am the P-I of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Network on 'The British Empire, Scotland and Indian Famines'. We are organising two conferences and one authors' workshop on the topic of 'The British Empire and Colonial Famines: History, Culture, Critique' in Edinburgh (2022, 2023) and Guwahati (2023) and one public engagement event in Kolkata (2024). For more details, see here: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/rseaward_indianfamines/

Chief Editor from 2014: Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry (https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap)

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