Organisers - The British Empire, Scotland, and Indian Famines: Writings on Food Crisis in Colonial India

Events Organising Committee:

P-I: Dr Sourit Bhattacharya is Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include colonial and postcolonial studies, famine and disaster studies, world-literature, ‘vernacular’ writings, and literary aesthetics. He has published a monograph on Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave, 2020) and a co-edited volume on Nabarun Bhattacharya (Bloomsbury 2020). He is currently finishing a second monograph on Postcolonialism Now (Orient BlackSwan 2023). Sourit holds a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant on the literary and cultural works of the 1943 Bengal famine and plans to use the RSE Network to form further research collaborations on Indian and colonial famines.

Co-I: Dr Rajarshi Mitra is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Guwahati. For his PhD at the English & Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, he had worked on natural history narratives from India between 1857 and 1950. His research interests include history of cinema and the cultural experiences of the British Empire. He has published papers on the Bengali experience of the First World War, famine rhetoric in British India, and the big game hunting culture of the Raj era. At IIITG, he teaches Anglo-American Science Fiction, Introduction to Film Studies and Indian Writing in English.

Co-I: Dr. Binayak Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor in Media Science at the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, West Bengal, India. He previously worked at the Manipal University, Manipal and the National Film Archive of India, Pune. His research interests lie in Indian cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, Marxist cultural movements in India, censorship, famine, and Soviet cinema in India. He has published on these areas in Rupkatha (2013), Salaam Bollywood (2016), Sanglap (2017), Studies in People’s History (2021), and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema (2021). He is currently PI on a project on war and its cinematic reflections in India, sponsored by the National Film Archive of India.

Steering Committee (alphabetically):

Prof Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor of English (Emerita) at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Her research interests include English and European Renaissance literature, Indian cultural history, travel writing, modernism, critical theory and translation. Her recent publications are Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (co-edited, 2018) and chapters in Modernist Communities Across Culture and Media (2020), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019), and The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture (2012).

Prof Marguérite Corporaal is Professor of Irish Literature in Transnational Contexts at Radboud University, Netherlands. She is an expert on global literary writings of the Great Irish famine as well as cultural works on famines in a European context. Apart from founding the Irish Studies Network at Radboud, she has published The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Cultures (2018), Recollecting Hunger (2017), Global Irish Migration and Memory (2016), and others.

Prof Bashabi Fraser is a poet and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University. She is the co-founder and director of Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies and has expertise in the areas of Scottish-Indian literary connections. Her most recent publications include Rabindranath Tagore: A Critical Biography (2019), Scottish Orientalism and the Bengali Renaissance (2017), Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes (2017), and Thali Katori: An Anthology of Scottish and South Asian Poetry (2017).

Prof Peter Gray is Professor in the School of History in Queen’s University, Belfast. Professor Gray’s research specializes in the history of British-Irish relations c.1800-70, especially the political history of the Great Famine of 1845-50 and the politics of poverty and land in the nineteenth century. His publications include The Irish Famine and Social Class (2019), The Great Famine (2018), “HB’s Famine Cartoons” (2018), and others.

Prof Nigel Leask is Regius Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has research interests in Romantic literature and culture, Robert Burns, Scottish literature and thought 1750-1850, travel writing, and Anglo-Indian literatures of the Romantic period. His most recent work include Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour (2020), Philosophical Vagabonds (2019), and Robert Burns and Pastoral (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Dr Andrew Mackillop is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow. He works in the areas of early modern Scottish history, the East India Company, British empire in Asia, 1690-1820, and Scottish immigration. His relevant works include “Scots in Asia” RSE- Knowledge Made Useful 15 (2016), “Accessing Empire” (Itinerario 2015), “A Union for Empire?” (The Scottish Historical Review, 2008), and Governors and Imperial Frontiers (2003).

Dr Ayesha Mukherjee is Associate Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. Her research interests lie in the field of early modern literature and cultural history, particularly, the literature and history of famine and dearth. Her published works include A Cultural History of Famine (2019), Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England (2015) and a forthcoming monograph on Cultural and Medical Geographies of Dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1700.

Dr Janam Mukherjee is Department Chair in History at Ryerson University, Toronto. His research explores the social history of war, famine, and riots in Bengal. His recent publications include an acclaimed monograph, Hungry Bengal (2015) and several essays in journals and edited books.

Prof Alan Riach is a poet and Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. His research interests span modern Scottish literature, Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish literature in an imperialist/postcolonial context, and Scottish-Indian literary connections. His published works numerous articles in journals and newspapers and books such as Arts and Nation (2017), Representing Scotland (2005), Clearances (2001) and others.

Jan Usher is a Head Curator of Social Science Collections at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. She takes care of the India Papers and the Medical History of British India collections and has previously curated and led exhibitions on the World War papers.