Navigation auf uzh.ch
Navigation auf uzh.ch
Monographs:
2018
Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta. Studies in Environment and History Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108348867 (Indian edition February 2019; Paperback June 2019).
Reviewed in:
Maya Jassanof New York Review of Books; Rohan D’Souza H-Water; Jeremy Schmidt Environmental Values; David Arnold English Historical Review; Renisa Mawani Law, Humanities and Culture; Tirthankar Roy Journal of Interdisciplinary History; Jenia Mukherjee Journal of History; Benjamin Siegel Environmental History; Gagan Preet Singh H-Asia; John Hutnyk South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies; Peter Robb Environment and History; Sanjukta Das Gupta Conservation and Society; Wilko Hardenberg, H-Sci-Med-Tech; Nabaparna Ghosh, Journal of Asian Studies; Sujit Sivasundaram, American Historical Review, Kaustubh Mani, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.
Refereed Journal Articles:
2021 “‘A River is not a Pendulum’: Sediments of Science in the World of Tides” in Isis, 112, no. 1 (March 2021): 141-149. Special Issues on “Knowing the Littorals.” https://doi.org/10.1086/713567 (OA)
2020 “Indian City and its ‘Restive Publics’: A Review Essay,” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 4 (2020), 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X19000301(invited).
“Speculation: A Concept History,” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40, no. 1 (2020), 51-56. Special Issue on “Concepts of the Urban.” https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-8186038
2019 “Land Dispossession in South Asia,” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Asian Studies. ed. David Ludden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). DOI:
10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.189
2019 “Provincializing the History of Speculation from Colonial India,” History Compass, 17: e12517 (2019). doi:10.1111/hic3.12517
“Fluid Histories: Swamps, Law and the Company-State in Colonial Bengal,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient. 61, no. 5-6 (2018): 1036-73. Special Issue on “Repossessing Property in South Asia: Land, Rights and Law across Modern/Early Modern Divide.” doi:10.1163/15685209-12341466
2018 “Discipline and Drain: Settling the Moving Bengal Delta,” Global Environment 11, (2018): 236-257. Special Issue on “Environment, Disaster and Property.” doi:10.3197/ge.2018.110203
2017 “Ethics/ Reading /Sex: How do We Read?” Feminist Formations 29, no. 3 (2017): 193-7. doi:10.1353/ff.2017.0041
2016 “Hoarding Land: Interwar Housing Speculation and Rent Profiteering in Colonial Calcutta,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (2016): 465-82. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-3699007
2015 “The History of Eminent Domain in British Colonial Thought and Legal Practice in South Asia,” Economic and Political Weekly 50, no. 50 (2015): 45-53.
Refereed Book Chapters:
2022 “Prophetic Science: The Government of Wind in the Bay of Bengal” in Narrative Science, ed. Mary Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021 OA), ERC Grant # 694732. (OA)
2020 “Politics of Dwelling: Divergent Spaces in Calcutta,” Richardson Dilworth and Timothy Weaver eds. Role of Ideas in Urban Political Development, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 202-14.
2013 “Geography’s Myth: The Many Origins of Calcutta” Gyanendra Pandey, ed., Unarchived Histories: The Mad and the Trifling in the Colonial and Postcolonial World (New York: Routledge, 2013), 144-58.
2008 “Nation-less Bodies and National Identity in Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga Opar Ganga” Ansgar Nünning, Birgit Neumann and Bo Petersson, eds., Narrative and Identity: Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses (Trier: Wissenschaftler Verlag Trier, 2008), 127-40.
2008 “Of Shadows and Silences: Militant Nationalism in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines” Klaus Stierstorfer and Annette Kern-Stähler, eds., Literary Encounters of Fundamentalism: A Case Book (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2008), 75-88.
Book Reviews:
2020 Benjamin Siegel, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Environmental History 25, no. 1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emz064
2020 Craig Jeffrey, Modern India: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) American Historical Review 125, Issue 4, October 2020, Pages 1355–1357, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1263
2019 “Microhistory of a Forgotten Disaster,” Benjamin Kingsway, An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876 (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2018) Economic and Political Weekly, 54, no. 36 (2019). https://www.epw.in/journal/2019/36/book-reviews/micro-history-forgotten-disaster.html
2019 Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2018) H-Diplo. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53256
2019 Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction of the Time of Empire (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2017) Law and History Review 37, no. 2 (May 2019): 639-41. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248019000282
2017 Amrita Pande, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) Enterprise and Society 18, no. 2 (2017): 474-76. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2016.88
2016 Andrew Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and Empire 1500 - 2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Political Theory 45, no. 3 (2016): 416-19.
https://10.1177/0090591716640460
2015 Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkley: University of California Press, 2014) for South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (2015): 351-52. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1020476
Sandeep Banerjee “Landscaping India: From Colony to Postcolony” (PhD Thesis: Syracuse University, 2013), Dissertation Reviews, February, 2015. http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/10573
2012 Richard Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) Gender, Place & Culture 19, no.1 (2012): 121-23.
2011 Mariam Dossal, Theatre of Conflict, City of Hope: Bombay/Mumbai, 1660 to Present Times (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 2010) Urban Studies 48, no.11 (2011): 2429-31.
2006 (in German) Río-Álvaro, Constanza Del und Luis Miguel García-Mainar, eds. Memory, Imagination and Desire in Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2004) KULT_online, 11 August 2006. http://kult-online.uni-giessen.de/archiv/2006/ausgabe-11
Report Commissioned by the Government of West Bengal, India
2011 Co-authored with Paromita Chakravarti, Imagined Homes: Homeless People Envision Shelters (Kolkata: The Calcutta Samaritans, 2011).
Public Scholarship:
2020 Co-authored with Megnaa Mehtta, “More Than Rising Water: Living Tenuously in the Sundarbans. Part 1,” The Diplomat https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/more-than-rising-water-living-tenuously-in-the-sundarbans/ and “Is the Managed Retreat Plan for the Sundarbans Misguided? Part 2,” The Diplomat https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/is-the-managed-retreat-plan-for-the-sundarbans-misguided/
2020 Co-authored with Megnaa Mehtta, “Shifting Lives in the Mangrove: Is Concrete the Way Forward,” The Telegraph https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/is-concrete-the-way-forward-in-rebuilding-the-sunderbans/cid/1784882
2020 Co-authored with Banu Subrahmaniam, “A Viral Education: Scientific Lessons from India’s WhatsApp University,” Somatosphere http://somatosphere.net/2020/a-viral-education-scientific-lessons-from-indias-whatsapp-university.html/
2020 Co-authored with Banu Subrahmaniam, “Technofascism in India,” n+1.
https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/technofascism-in-india/
(republished in Jessie Kindig, Mark Krotov and Marco Roth eds. There is no Outside: Covid19 Dispatches (New York: Verso 2020).
2020 Almanac of a Tide Country, Items SSRC (2020) https://items.ssrc.org/ways-of-water/almanac-of-a-tide-country.
2018 Co-authored with Seth Denbo, “When a Journal is a Scam: Predatory Journals and Scholarship as Public Good,” Perspectives in History.
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2018/when-a-journal-is-a-scam-how-some-publications-prey-on-scholarship-as-public-good
2018 Introduction “Discovery of India(s): Resisting the National Biography,” special issue edited by Arvind Elangovan in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41, no. 3 (2018): 601-604, doi:10.1080/00856401.2018.1485621.
2017 Co-authored with Adam Knowles, “Ideal Subject of Totalitarianism,” Revue des femmes philosophes, 127-138 http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0026/002655/265538m.pdf.
2017 “Arbit” Special Issue on Everyday Keywords in South Asia, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (2017): 279-80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2017.1292602
2017 “Being River: The Law, the Person and the Unthinkable,” World Legal History, H-Law. https://networks.h-net.org/node/16794/blog/world-legal-history-blog/177310/being-river-law-person-and-unthinkable
2017 “Soaking Ecologies: Rethinking Asian Urbanism,” International Institute of Asian Studies Newsletter, 76. http://iias.asia/the-newsletter/article/soaking-ecologies-rethinking-asian-urbanism
2016 “Manufactured Landscapes: Law and Hydraulics in the Bengal Delta,” Technology Stories: Past and Present, June 2016. http://www.technologystories.org/manufactured-landscapes-law-and-hydraulics-in-the-bengal-delta/
2012 (in Bengali) “Wall Street Theke,” Anandabazar Patrika, November 6, 2012.
Other Media:
- Interview: “Archives of Economic Lives, Cambridge University https://www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/archives-asia/interviews/bhattacharyya.html
- Podcast: “Climate History,” https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/climate-history-podcast/id1022409974 (Forthcoming May 2021).
- Movie Research and Appearance, “Morris and Indigo: Drexel’s Collection,” https://drexel.edu/drexelcollection/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/Gateway/
- Podcast: “Technofascism in India” Tech Won’t Save Us: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/technofascism-in-india-banu-subramaniam-debjani-bhattacharyya/id1507621076?i=1000479574285
- Podcast: “The Science of Planning: Notes from Indian Economic History” at the HPPE Seminar, London School of Economics, Episode 5 Ceteris non Paribus, The History of Economic Thought Podcast https://ceterisnonparibus.net/debjani-bhattacharyya-on-the-science-of-planning-notes-from-indian-economic-history-at-the-hppe-seminar-episode-5/
- Podcast: “A Naturally-Forming Harbor: Silt, Geological Testimony and the Bengal Delta,” Centre for South Asian Study Seminar, Cambridge University. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/centre-of-south-asian-studies-seminars/id1112589084?mt=2
