Biography
Tania Bhattacharyya (she/they) joined the University as a Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the Centre for South Asian Studies in January 2023. Prior to that they were a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows (2019-22) and briefly a visiting research associate at the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University in Kampala in 2022. They received their PhD in History at Columbia University in 2019, a second B.A. with senior status from the University of Oxford in 2012 where they read history as a Rhodes Scholar, and their first BA in History from St. Stephens College in the University of Delhi in 2010. Their doctoral research has been funded by a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for dissertation completion, a Mellon/ Council on Library and Information Resources Fellowship for research in original sources, a Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, and Columbia University’s Evelyn Walker and Richard Hofstadter Fellowships.
Research
Tania is a social historian of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Their research interests lie in the history of the city, the nation, borders, itinerancy, labour, capitalism, cinema and popular culture, gender and community. Their book manuscript, Ocean Bombay, 1839-1945: Space, Itinerancy and Community in an Imperial Port City, tells the century long story of colonial Bombay’s spatial, economic and socio-political transformation from a port city to a mill city. Through accounts of community building amongst the itinerant, transoceanic residents of the city the book practices a critique of the methodological nationalism inherent in much intellectual inquiry about the subcontinent. The archival and ethnographic research for their book was conducted in English, Persian and Hindi between Mumbai, Delhi, London, Birmingham and Tehran.
