Dr Sourit Bhattacharya

Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures

Biography

Background

I am a Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Edinburgh. Before this, I was a Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Glasgow and an Assistant Professor of English at IIT Roorkee, India. I received my PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies from the University of Warwick in 2017. My research and supervision interests include colonial and postcolonial literatures, South Asian literatures and cultures, environmental and disaster studies, and Marxist literary theory.

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

Postgraduate teaching

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. I am currently working on a project funded by a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant on the literary and cultural works of 1943 Bengal famine which will 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. We will hold four events through this Network until 2024, details here: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/rseaward_indianfamines/. I am also interested in exploring the concept of world literature from the perspective of world-capitalism and world-disasters. I have either published or forthcoming work in these areas including two monographs on Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave, 2020) and Postcolonialism Now (Orient BlackSwan, 2023).

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 amongst ethnic minority communities. Webpage here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/researchinstitutes/artslab/labsandthemes/collegewidethemes/foodsovereignty/

My other interest is in local, vernacular, or regional literatures that both incorporate worldly forms and challenge homogeneous readings of them. To this end, I have published an edited volume on the radical Indian-Bengali writer, Nabarun Bhattacharya (Bloomsbury, 2020).  I'm collaborating with Dr Arka Chattopadhyay from IIT Gandhinagar on a global modernism project that has arisen out of an ACLA seminar and a subsequent journal special issue and followed by Dr Chattopadhyay's Charles Wallace fellowships at IASH, Edinburgh.

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)

View all 26 publications on Research Explorer

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