Dr Sourit Bhattacharya
Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures

- English Literature
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
- Email: sourit.bhattacharya@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room 2.23
School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
50 George Square - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9HL
Availability
Term 1 office hours: Thursday 3-4pm
Other hours: by appointment
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.
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 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 Sem 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. I also hold a Royal Society of Edinburgh Network Award on the British empire, Scotland, and Indian famines bringing scholars and public bodies in the UK and India together to interrogate colonialism's role in 'making' and preventing famines in India, and how these famines fuelled anti-colonial nationalist writings and campaigns. This would allow to hold four events through this Network until 2024, 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 reception among ethnic minority communities. Webpage here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/researchinstitutes/artslab/labsandthemes/collegewidethemes/foodsovereignty/
My other interest lies in reading postcolonial and world literatures from an anti-colonial and peripheral perspective. My second monograph, 'Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising' (forthcoming Orient BlackSwan) reads literary and cultural texts -- poetry, theatre, novel, film, documentary, graphic novel, non-fiction from the last three 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 margins. This book is aimed at students and scholars aiming to learn how to read or 'do' postcolonial literature from an anti-colonial lens.
I've taken this interest to a cognate field of vernacular world literatures and 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 'vernacular' world modernism project that has arisen out of an ACLA seminar and a subsequent journal special issue and Dr Chattopadhyay's Charles Wallace fellowships at IASH, Edinburgh.
Forthcoming publications:
- “The Postcolonial Afterlife in South Africa: AIDS, Xenophobia, and the Community of Healing in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow”, in Sreejith Varma and Ajanta Sircar eds., Contagion Narratives (Routledge), 2023
- “'Postcolonial Disaster'": Purdah, Precarity, and Hunger in Abu Ishaque's Surja Dighal Bari.” South Asian Review, 2023
- “ Indigo, World-ecology, World-literature: Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan” in Sudesh Mishra & Caitlin Vandertop and eds., Commodities and Literature (Cambridge UP), 2023
- “Capitalist World-ecology, Food Crisis, and Embodied Aesthetics in Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve" in Literature and Cinema in Postcolonial India (Routledge), 2024
- “Plants in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Indian Writings”, in Bonnie Lander Johnson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Plants (Cambridge UP), 2024
- “Postcolonial Disasters and Literary Aesthetics: An Eco-materialist Reading” in Kerstin Oloff, Treasa DeLoughrey, Claire Westall, and Sharae Deckard eds., The Routledge Companion to Literature and the Environment (Routledge), 2024
Research activities
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)
-
"Postcolonial Disaster": Purdah, precarity, and hunger in Abu Ishaque’s Surja Dighal Bari (The Ominous House)
In:
South Asian Review, vol. 44, pp. 28-36
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2156171
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
The postcolonial afterlife in South Africa: AIDS, xenophobia, and the community of healing in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow
(14 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003285373-7
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published) -
Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century (2020): Review essay
In:
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 24
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4298
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Review article (Published) -
Regional ecologies and peripheral aesthetics in Indian literature: Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Hansuli Banker Upakatha
In:
South Asian Review, vol. 42, pp. 387-402
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2021.1905482
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Nabarun Bhattacharya and his world: An introduction
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9789389812473
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
Nuclear Winter
(314 pages)
Research output: › Book (Published) -
Toxic ecologies of the Global South: The ecogothic in Nabarun Bhattacharya's Toy City
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9789389812473.ch027
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
Magic and realism in South Asia
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics
(314 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9789389812473
Research output: › Anthology (Published) -
Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism
(280 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37397-9
Research output: › Book (Published)
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)