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ICSSR Sponsored Three-Day International Conference
Novelist, Creative Writer, Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of eight novels, including his most recent work, Sojourn (2022). He is also a poet, essayist, critic, short story writer, and musician. In 2024, his first three novels were reissued under the New York Review Books Classics imprint, with introductions by Colm Toibin, James Wood, and Wendy Doniger. Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems was published in 2023 in the NYRB Poets series. Chaudhuri has garnered several awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Sahitya Akademi Award from the Government of India, the Rabindra Puraskar from the Government of West Bengal, and the inaugural Infosys Prize in Literary Studies in the Humanities. He is currently a Professor of Creative Writing and the Director of the Centre for the Creative and Critical at Ashoka University, having previously served as Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006 to 2021.
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, RKSMVV, West Bengal State University
Anasua Chatterjee teaches Sociology at RKSMVV, Kolkata, India. Her research interests include urban diversity, inequalities, and spatial transformation with an emphasis on ethnographic methods. Her first detailed fieldwork, conducted for her doctoral dissertation, was on a Muslim predominant neighbourhood in Kolkata, which was published as a monograph by Routledge (2017). She has also contributed widely in edited volumes and international peer-reviewed journals on aspects of urban identity, belonging, and change. She is currently working on her second book project which engages with experiences of middle-class residential neighbourhoods of Kolkata, tentatively titled Shifting Dynamics of Urban Dwelling in Kolkata: Neighbourhoods of Everyday Life, with the Amsterdam University Press (AUP). Besides, she enjoys being in the field, exploring possibilities of ethnographic documentation in the contexts of cities of South and Southeast Asia.
Photographer, Artist Curator and Educator
Arko Datto is an artist, lecturer and curator. Datto’s work thematically examines a range of urban forms, forced migration, digital surveillance in the panopticon, vanishing islands, nocturnal landscapes, and the psychosomatic stress experienced by captive animals. While his subjects are varied, they collectively address the existential dilemmas of our times. Through the incorporation and evolution of diverse visual languages, narratives, and styles, Datto expands the boundaries of both still and moving images. His photographs have been published in TIME, National Geographic, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Trouw, de Volkskrant, Vrij Nederland amongst others. He received grants from the Prince Claus Fund, Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, IDFA Bertha Fund. Recent shows have been at Fotografia Europea, Light Work, SFO Museum, Fotomuseum Den Haag, Hamburger Bahnhof. He has published three photo books: Pik-nik (Editions Le bec en l’air, 2018), Mannequin (Edizioni L’artiere, 2018), and Snakefire (Edizioni L’artiere, 2021). As a curator, he has been associated with Galleri Image, Kochi Biennale, Obscura Photography Festival and Chennai Photo Biennale. Datto is currently working on a commissioned photography project by the British Academy on the creative reinterpretation of Nandini Das’ Courting India which won the British Academy Book Prize in 2023.
Lecturer in English, Edinburgh Napier University
Arunima Bhattacharya is a Lecturer in English at Edinburgh Napier University. Her research interests include colonial urban cultures, early twentieth-century travel literature and island ecologies. Bhattacharya has an active interest in museums and the heritage sector, particularly with community participation and co-creation. She is currently a co-lead on an AHRC-funded project titled, “White Thinking” And the Failed Promise of Diversity in Scottish Heritage”, jointly run by Edinburgh Napier University and the University of Strathclyde. She is working on widening community participation in urban cultural heritage with a focus on British colonial history and migrant communities from postcolonial countries. Her most recent published work includes a journal article titled, ‘Beyond the developmental narrative of postcolonial nation-time: The Materialities of Water and Geological Faultlines in Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing’ in Postcolonial Text (2024), and a co-edited special issue titled “Between the Field and the Gallery: Exploring Anthropological Knowledge in South Asia in the journal South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2024). She has also co-edited a book volume titled, Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century: Spaces beyond the Centres (Palgrave, 2022).
Chair of History, South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg
Professor Kama Maclean holds the Chair of History in the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and is Honorary Professor in the Department of Humanities and Languages at UNSW, Sydney. She is the author of Pilgrimage and Power (OUP, 2008), A Revolutionary History of Interwar India (OUP 2015), and British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, Intercolonial Relations and the Empire, 1901-1947 (UNSW Press, 2020), and numerous articles in scholarly books and journals. She is currently working on a DFG-funded research project on Sonic Aspects of Anticolonialism in Interwar India.
Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Manish K. Jha is a Professor at the School of Social Work at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. He has served as the Chairperson of the Centre for Community Organisation & Development Practice from 2012 to 2015. He was a faculty in the Department of Social Work at the University of Delhi from 1999 to 2003. With over two decades of experience in teaching and research, Prof. Jha’s work focuses on Social Policy, Social Action, Social Movements, Rural Society and State, and Community Organization and Development Practice. He has authored books and edited volumes on the Politics of Social Justice and Development, as well as numerous articles on topics such as migration and the middle classes in Indian cities, popular politics, social justice, poverty and urban space, and disaster and development. Additionally, he has contributed to various reports and research projects for government agencies and non-profit organizations, and he serves on the governing boards of multiple universities, research institutions, and NGOs.
Critical Geographer, Former Post-Doctoral Fellow, Centre for Place, Culture and Politics, Graduate Center, City University of New York
Mythri is a critical geographer whose research interests primarily revolve around migration and urban transformation in contemporary India. She received her PhD from the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Building on political economy, radical geography and ethnographic methods, her doctoral research traces the different types of recruitment of migrants and local Malayali workers that reflect political contests and settlements between trade unions, corporate construction companies and recruitment agencies. She is currently working on her book manuscript based on her dissertation. Among her recent publications are two articles: “Cards and Carriers: Politics of Identification in Kerala, South India” in Contemporary South Asia and “The Cultural Politics of Wages: Ethnography of construction work in Kochi, India” in Contributions to Indian Sociology.
Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIIT Guwahati
Rajarshi Mitra is an Assistant Professor and Head at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Guwahati. Before joining IIIT Guwahati, he taught at the Department of English, Central University of Karnataka. Mitra earned his PhD in 2014 from The English & Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, where he focused on natural history narratives from India between 1857 and 1950. His research interests encompass the history of cinema, the British city and colonial press, natural disasters, and discourses surrounding the leisure cultures of the British Empire. Mitra has published articles on various topics, including the Bengali experience during the First World War, famine rhetoric in British India, cinema propaganda in colonial India, and the culture of big game hunting during the Raj era. He is currently involved in two collaborative projects: "The British Empire, Scotland and Indian Famines: Writings on Food Crisis in Colonial India," funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Network, and "Fairground Experience in Cooch Behar," An Arts Practice project supported by the India Foundation for the Arts.
Professor, University of Warwick
Rashmi Varma is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She began her teaching career at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi, before moving to the United States to pursue a PhD in English and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Rashmi then served as an Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before joining Warwick in 2004. She is the co-editor (with Robyn Warhol and others) of Women’s Worlds: The McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women’s Literature in English (2008). Her research focuses on the postcolonial city, postcolonial theory in Indian and African contexts, global feminism, representations of indigeneity in postcolonial India, and the theory of world literature. She is the author of The Postcolonial City and its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay (Routledge).
Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi.
Stuti Khanna serves as an Associate Professor of Literature in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. She earned her Master’s degree from Delhi University and her D.Phil. from Oxford University, where her doctoral research focused on a comparative study of urban representation in the fictions of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie. Her research interests encompass a variety of fields, including urban studies, modernism, post-colonialism, South Asia, gender studies, translation, and cinema. Khanna authored the monograph The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-conceiving National and Narrative Form (2013), which examines the fragmented landscape of the twentieth-century city and its profound influence on narrative fiction. This work connects two pivotal "world authors" from opposite ends of the century, exploring the colonial and postcolonial cities of their birth: James Joyce and Dublin, and Salman Rushdie and Bombay. Khanna also edited the volume of essays Writing the City: Looking Within, Looking Without, published in 2020 by Orient Blackswan.
