Profile



Name: Dr. Anuparna Mukherjee
Designation: Assistant Professor
Research Area: Literature
Department: Humanities and Social Sciences
E-Mail: anuparna[AT]iiserb.ac.in
Phone: +91 755 269 2711

About Me

I am currently serving as an assistant professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, 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

  • B.A., M.A., and M.Phil in English Literature
  • PhD in Literature, Australian National University

Employment and Professional Detail

  • 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.

Scholarships, Grants & Awards

  • The Australian National University HDR Tuition Fee Scholarship (2014-2018)
  • The Australian National University Living Expense Scholarship (2014-2018)
  • ANU Senior Residential Scholarship (2017)
  • Recipient of the ACLA (The American Comparative Literature Association) Travel Grant, 2019.
  • 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.
  • Awarded the ANU Vice-Chancellor's HDR Travel Grant for overseas research and conference in 2015
  • Runner Up at the Three-Minute Thesis Competition, organized by the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS), ANU in 2017.


Research

  • 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

Doctoral Supervision

  • 2020- . Ms. Pratiti Roy
    Area of Research: Memory Studies, Trauma Studies, Literature of Displacement

  • 2020-.Ms. Srijita Biswas.
    Area of Research: Gastronomy, Literature and City-Space

  • 2021-.Shobha Elizabeth John (Co-Supervision with Dr. Antara Chatterjee)
    Area of Research: Memory, Materiality and Aloneness

  • 2021-. Nakshatra Chatterjee
    Area of Research: Sound, Literature and City-Space

Select Conferences/Symposiums and Invited Lectures

  • 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. "Rivers and Memories: Migration, Ecology and Landscape in the Narratives of India's Partition" in the panel on Space and Migration at the The Migration Conference 2021 (TMC) from 6-10 July-London, UK.
  • 2021. "Undeads of Modernity: The Postcolonial City and Begum Johnson's Spectral Queendom" in the panel on Postcolonial Hauntologies during the Annual Convention of ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) from April 8-11, 2021.
  • 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 2021).
  • 2020. "Imperial Malady: Empire, Affect and Nostalgia" at the International Conference on Affect, Ecology, and Embodiment from 2-4 March 2020 at IIT Gandhinagar.
  • 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.
  • 2019. "Maps and Memories: Imagined Cities and Untranslated Worlds" as a part of the panel on Politics and Representation in Bengali Literature and Cinema at the International conference, Region/Nation/Trans-Nation: Literature-Cinema Interface, BITS Pilani, Goa from January 31-February 2, 2019.
  • 2018. "The Ghosted Empire: Haunting and Memory in Postcolonial Urban Culture" in Dialogues at IITGN, August 2018.
  • 2017. "Haunted Houses, Colonial Trauma and Nostalgia" , HRC City Conference on The Uncanny City: Strangers and Strangeness in Urban Literature, ANU.
  • 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.
  • 2011. "Memory and Microstorias in Narrativising India's Partition" was presented at the Annual International Conference, Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA), Scripps College, Claremont, California from 5-6 November 2011.
  • 2011. "'Acrobating between Tradition and Modern`-In Search of an Alternate Modernity" at the 7th Annual International Conference of Indian Society for Theatre Research, University of Hyderabad.
  • 2009. "Shakespeare's Brave New World and the Relationality of Spaces in The Tempest" was presented at the UGC-sponsored All India Student Seminar at Jadavpur University on 19 March 2009.

Publications

Authors Title of Article Journal Year
Anuparna Mukherjee
 Translating Worlds: Migration, Memory and Culture by Susannah Radstone and Rita Wilson (Review) Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Enquiry 2021
Anuparna Mukherjee
 River and Memories: Migration, Ecology and Landscape in the Narratives of India's Partition 2021
Anuparna Mukherjee
 Viral Nostalgia and the Case of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Economic and Political Weekly 2020
Anuparna Mukherjee
 After the Empire: Narratives of Haunting in the Postcolonial Spectropolis South Asian Review. Taylor & Francis 2019
Anuparna Mukherjee
 The Chronicle of the Caged Bird: Gender, Quotidian and New Women in Post- Partition Literature Café Dissensus, 2018


Book Chapters

Author Editors Title Publisher Year
Anuparna Mukherjee
 Shonaleeka Kaul
 Reading "Nostalgia in Bengali Literature from 13th to the 19th Centuries" Routledge 2022
Anuparna Mukherjee
 Sourit Bhattacharya
 Kolkata and the Urban Wasteland in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Spectral City Bloomsbury 2020

Academic experience

  • Teaching undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD courses in literary studies
  • Doctoral mentorship and supervision
  • Developing doctoral curriculum for the coursework in literary studies
  • Serving as an external examiner for M.A. dissertation and viva at 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