HSS/IISER Bhopal


Dr. Anuparna Mukherjee


Assistant Professor
Literature

anuparna@iiserb.ac.in
91 755 269 2711
  • Academic
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Teaching
  • Book Chapters
  • Invited Talks

    About

  • I am currently serving as assistant professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at IISER Bhopal. I had completed my graduation from Presidency College, Kolkata, and hold a PhD degree in literature from the Australian National University. My work on memory tracks the intertwined trajectories of colonial modernity, spectrality, affect and environment, through the literature of the urban space. My research assesses nostalgia's ideological and social embodiments in Bengali literary and political culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It reads the transformation of Calcutta in literature from colonial to postcolonial times through the critical lens of nostalgia and its changing paradigms across time and space.

    • Academic Details

  • PhD in Literature from The Australian National University
  • Master of Arts (M.A.) in English Literature Presidency College, University of Calcutta
  • Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in English Literature, Presidency College, University of Calcutta

    • Grants and Awards

  • 2014-2018, The Australian National University HDR Tuition Fee Scholarship
  • 2014-2018, The Australian National University Living Expense Scholarship
  • 2017, ANU Senior Residential Scholarship
  • 2019, ACLA (The American Comparative Literature Association) Travel Grant
  • 2017, Runnerup at the Three-Minute Thesis Competition, organised by the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS),ANU
  • 2016, Selected by The Australian National University to be a part of their six-member team, representing ANU at the Cambridge AHRC DTP Conference (14-17 September 2016) at Peterhouse, Cambridge, jointly funded by the University of Cambridge and The Australian National University.
  • 2015, ANU Vice-Chancellor’s HDR Travel Grant for overseas research and conference

    • Professional Details

  • Assistant Professor, English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IISER Bhopal, December 2019 - present.
  • Assistant Professor of English in the Faculty of Arts and Social Studies, St. Xavier's University Kolkata, July 2019-December 2019.
  • Written self-learning module (M.A. in English, Part II) for the Directorate of Distance Education (DDE), Vidyasagar University (2019).
  • In 2017, tutored the course on "Writing in the Public Sphere" in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at ANU.




Research Interests

  • Memory Studies with specific focus on Nostalgia and Trauma
  • Colonial Modernity
  • Indian Modernisms with a thrust on Bengali Modernism
  • Bengal in the 19th and 20th Centuries
  • Literatures on City and the Urban Space
  • Literature of Displacement and Migration with special focus on the Indian Partition
  • Bengali literature
  • Postcolonialism
  • Affect Studies
  • Haunting and Spectrality






    • Supervision

  • There are four doctoral students working under my supervision.
  • 2020- . Ms. Pratiti Roy. Area: Memory and Trauma Studies, Literature of Displacement
  • 2020-.Ms. Srijita Biswas. Area: Gastronomy, Literature and the City-Space
  • 2021-.Shobha Elizabeth John (Co-Supervision with Dr. Antara Chatterjee): Memory, Isolation and the Urban Space.
  • 2021-. Nakshatra Chatterjee Area: Sound, Memory and the City-Space



    • Academic experience

  • Teaching undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD courses in literary studies
  • Doctoral mentorship and supervision
  • Developing doctoral curriculum for the coursework in literary studies
  • Served as the Postgraduate Convener (2021-2023) in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IISER Bhopal.
  • External paper setter for Masters in English literary Studies.
  • Moderator and External examiner for M.A. dissertation in Literature (St. Xavier’s University)

    • Courses offered at IISER Bhopal

  • HSS 606: Memory and the City-Space
  • HSS 315/615: Memory, Movement and Migration in Modern South Asian Literature.
  • HSS 330/630: Introduction to Modern Drama
  • HSS 325/625: Reading Children's Literature: Adventures, Ghosts and the Cultural Imagination
  • HSS 337/637: Cities: Memories, Perceptions and Stories



    • # Authors Title Journals Year
    1 Anuparna Mukherjee Translating Worlds: Migration, Memory and Culture by Susannah Radstone and Rita Wilson (Review) Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Enquiry 2021
    2 Anuparna Mukherjee Viral Nostalgia and the Case of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Economic and Political Weekly 2020
    3 Anuparna Mukherjee After the Empire: Narratives of Haunting in the Postcolonial Spectropolis South Asian Review. Taylor & Francis 2019
    4 Anuparna Mukherjee The Chronicle of the Caged Bird: Gender, Quotidian and New Women in Post- Partition Literature Café Dissensus, 2018
    5 Anuparna Mukherjee “Through the ‘Charnel Ground of History’: Reading Women’s Journey through the Debris of Indian Partition” Rocky Mountain Review (Archived in JSTOR) 2012
    Authors Editors Title Publisher Year
    Anuparna Mukherjee
    		 Parichay Patra
    		 Modernity on Wheels: Reading Trains as Sites of Encounter and Disaster Routledge 2024
    Anuparna Mukherjee
    		 Ambika Aiyadurai
    		 Imperial Malady: Empire and Affect in Colonial Narratives Orient Blackswan 2023
    Anuparna Mukherjee
    		 Shonaleeka Kaul
    		 Knots of Time Reading Nostalgia in Bengali Literature from 13th to the 19th Centuries Routledge 2022
    Anuparna Mukherjee
    		 Sourit Bhattacharya
    		 Kolkata and the Urban Wasteland in Nabarun Bhattacharyas Spectral City Bloomsbury 2020
    Authors Editors Title Publisher Year


      Invited Lectures: Conferences/Symposiums (Selected)

    • 1. SELECT LECTURES, ACADEMIC WORKSHOPS AND CONFERENCES
    • 2023. Delivered a Plenary talk at the International Conference on In Search of Creative Commons: Crisis, Catastrophe and Responsive Literature in India, funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), and jointly organized by Abid Ali Khan Centre for Digital Archive and Translation of Cultures (AAKCDATC), Gour Mahavidyalaya, Malda and Department of English, Dr. Meghnad Saha College. 31 August-2 September.
    • 2023. “The Famished City: Displacement and Hunger in Calcutta of the 1940s”. Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Network conference on The British Empire, Scotland, and Indian Famines, 23-25 May.
    • 2022. “Ambivalent Modernity: The Colonial City and the Bengal Renaissance” in the Nineteenth Century”. Australian Modernist Studies Network V: Cultures of Modernity Conference. University of Auckland, 12-14 December, 2022.
    • 2022. “The Home and the Empire: Nostalgia and the British Women in Narratives of the Raj” at the inaugural symposium of the MemoryHub, convened by Dr Rosanne Kennedy and Dr Shameem Black. The Australian National University, 15-16 November, 2022.
    • 2022. Keynote Panel. “Modernist Spaces in Rabindranath Tagore’s Lipika: From the text to the City”. 1922 Turned Upside Down. Australasian Association for Literature (AAL) 2022 Conference. Western Sydney University. Co-presented the paper with Dr. Arka Chattopadhyay.
    • 2022. “Nostalgia’s Maps: Habitability and its Limits in the Imperial Narratives of Colonial India”. Habitability and Empire International Conference. University College Dublin, 23-24 June 2022.
    • 2022. Panel Organiser and Presenter. ““Affective Dwellings”: Space, Ecology and Memory in South Asian Narratives of Displacement”. Crossovers: Imaginaries of Movement in Culture and Literary Aesthetics. Annual Convention of ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association). 15-18 June.
    • 2021. “Connecting the Nation: Reading Trains as Sites of Encounter and Disaster in South Asian Narratives” in the panel on India (De)Constructed at the 12th International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS) from 24-28 August, Kyoto Japan.
    • 2021. “The “Unaccustomed Earth”: Memory, Migration and the Quotidian in the Literature of Indian Partition” at the conference on Memories in Transit: Transnational Memory and Identity across Modern Regimes of Displacement and Dispersion by the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge (15-16 April 2020).
    • 2019. “Travelling Cities, Untranslated Worlds” in the panel on World Literature, Does the Untranslated Travel? Towards a Regional World Literature at the Annual Convention of ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association), Georgetown University, Washington DC from 7-10 March 2019.
    • 2017. “‘Rouges and Rebels’: Night Walking, Nostalgia and Decadence in Postcolonial Calcutta”. Adda Seminar Series by South Asia Research Institute (SARI), ANU.
    • 2016. “‘Memory’s Gold’: Nostalgia’s Time and Search of a Lost Home” at the Cambridge AHRC DTP Conference from 14-17 September 2016 at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, UK.
    • 2015. “The Inheritance of Loss: Nostalgia and Trauma in Partition Historiography” in the First Global Meeting of The Exploring Nostalgia Project, Mansfield College, Oxford from 3-5 July 2015.
    • 2014. “Envisioning the City: The Bengali Modernist Poets and their Urban Imagination” in the conference organised by the Australian Modernist Study Network on Transnational Modernism, University of Sydney from 15-17 December 2014.
    • 2. ORGANISATION OF CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS
    • 2024. Co-convened with Dr. Renny Thomas the AJAI-IISERB workshop, Knowledge Production, Ethics and Reflexivity in South Asia, which was organized in collaboration with - CSH (Delhi) – IFP (Pondicherry) – Alliance Française de Bhopal EHESS-CESAH (Paris) from 5-7 March 2024.
    • 2023. Organized a two-day workshop, "Doing Ethnography: On Writing, Experience(s), and Explanation(s) with Dr Renny Thomas.
    • 2022. Organized a three-day online international conference with Dr. Antara Chatterjee on “Memory in Transition: Intersections, Contestations, Futures” (3-5March). Keynote Speakers: Marianne Hirsch, Nina Sabnani, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Cynthia Sugars, Angela Failler, Guneeta Singh Bhalla
    • 2017, Convened a two-day international conference with Thomas Nulley-Valdés on “The Uncanny City: Strangers and Strangeness in Urban Literature” under the auspice of the Humanities Research Centre, ANU.
    • 2017, Member of the organising committee for the inaugural Leadership Forum at Toad Hall, ANU.