Biography

Somdatta Bhattacharya has a PhD in English Studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Before joining the JSLL, she was an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur, from 2018-2024. Prior to that, she has also taught at BITS Pilani, Pilani campus (2013-2018) and at the University of Hyderabad (2011-2013). Her research interests are rooted in areas of urban cultures, social theories of space and spatiality, crime fiction, city in literature, Indian writing in English, gender and South Asian popular culture, and she has taught, published and supervised doctoral work extensively in these areas. In her research, she has explored the relationship between crime and criminality vis-à-vis urban infrastructures, urban planning and the built environment, mainly in the Indian context, but also in Nordic literary and cultural narratives. Moving beyond the scope of textual narratives, she has also published in the field of graphic narratives and has written about films and TV series in their connection with crime, the urban condition, migration and border studies. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Clues, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Society and Culture in South Asia and Studies in the Humanities. She has presented her work at both national and international conferences and has been a part of both government and privately funded research projects on the urban underclass and their usage of space in Indian cities.