Jigisha Bhattacharya, Churchill

Biographical Information

I am a second year PhD student at the University of Cambridge, funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust at Churchill College. I am the co-convener of the faculty seminar, 'Postcolonial and Related Literatures,' for 2023-24 and 2024-25. I research and write on art, culture and politics, and am interested in public-facing academic and creative work.

I am currently the Deputy Editor in Charge of The Scholar Magazine, and a panellist with the Declarations podcast. I volunteer with Project EduAccess as a graduate applications mentor, and have served as the first EDI and Accessibility Officer on the Gates Cambridge Scholars' Council. I am happy to be contacted for access, outreach, and diversity related work.

Before coming to Cambridge, I worked (2020-2022) as a lecturer in English at OP Jindal Global University in India. Prior to teaching, I completed my MPhil focusing on photographic archives in South Asia at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India. I studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Presidency University, Kolkata, in India, for my MA, and BA (Major) in English, respectively. 

Research Interests

I supervise in the Faculty for the Paper 1 (Part IA, IB, and II), Paper 11 (Part II), Paper 13 (Part II), and Paper 18 (Part II). I am also keen to supervise Paper  7b (Part I) and Paper 12 (Part II). I am happy to be contacted for supervision opportunities in these papers. I am also happy to supervise dissertations on a range of topics allied to my research interests. 

My research interests include: Postcolonial theory and literature, theories and literatures of decolonisation, global Anglophone, literatures from the global south and diaspora; prison literature, literature and censorship, carceral theory, abolitionist theory; critical race theory, anti-colonial thought, intellectual history; visual culture, film theory, literature and film adaptation, image-text interfaces, theories and histories of photography; theories of gender, global feminisms; dissident literature, protest poetry, global Marxisms; theories and politics of archives, material cultures, periodicals; 20th and 21st century poetry and fiction, memory studies, war literature, literature of conflict.

In general, I'm excited about close-reading, hybrid genres, and marginalised/ 'invisible' literature.

Selected Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

Bhattacharya, Jigisha. "Book Review: 'How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners' by Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia and 'Prison Writing and the Literary World: Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice' edited by Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall." Wasafiri 39 (2): 129–31. doi:10.1080/02690055.2024.2316435.

Bhattacharya, Jigisha. "Political Deification of Lord Parshuram: Tracing Brahminic Masculinity in Contemporary North India". Religion, vol. 52, no. 4, Routledge, 2022, pp. 550–575, https://doi.org10.1080/0048721X.2022.2094775.

Conference Papers:

“Soviet Periodicals in Bengali: The Global Cold War and the Third World”, Northeast Modern Languages Association (NeMLA) Annual Conference 2024 (Boston, Masachusetts, March 2024) 

"Dissident Political Rhetoric and the Imprints of Hunger: Tracing Afterlives of Bengal Famine in India after Independence", Royal Historical Society Transactions Workshop 80 Years of the Bengal Famine (1943): Decolonial Dialogues from the Global South (King's College London, July 2023)

"Writing the Imprisoned Self: Prison Memoirs as Alternative History of Women’s Political Subjectivity in Independent India", British Association for South Asian Studies Annual Conference (University of Leeds, March 2023)

Other Publications

Bhattacharya, Jigisha. “Seeing Kashmir as an Outsider: Snow as Metaphor.” ASAP Art, 19 July 2022.

Bhattacharya, Jigisha. “Women and Grief in Hindi Cinema.” Critical Collective, 11 July 2021.

Media

New Books Network with the Nordic Asia Podcast: "Hindu Nationalism and the Politics of Lord Parshuram" with Jigisha Bhattacharya and Solano da Silva (2022). 

Jadunath Bhavan Archival Talks Series: "Writing a Social History of Photographic Practices in Calcutta" by Jigisha Bhattacharya (2021).