Education

Ph.D., 1992, English, University of Rochester

M.A., 1989, English, University of Rochester

B.A., 1985, English Hons, Presidency College, Calcutta

Research Interests

Dr. Bhattacharya’s Scholars@TAMU Profile

• Creative Writing
• South Asia Studies
• Postcolonial and Globalization literature and theory
• Gender theory
• Critical theory
• World Literature
• Film Studies
• Race and Ethnic Studies
• Eighteenth-century British literature
• Race, Gender, Colonialism, Empire
• Film Studies
• Affect Theory
• Aging Studies

Honors and Awards

Ragdale Residency, May 2-20, 2022 (with scholarship)

“After the House Burned Down,” nominated for Pushcart prize, 2021

“Rowans, Oaks and Other Trees,” Finalist for the Saturday Evening Post Great American Stories Contest, October 2020

Love’s Garden, a novel (excerpt), Longlisted for the Disquiet International Literary Prize, 2019 and 2020

Vermont Studio Center Residency, July 7 — August 2, 2019 (Funded)

“Time to Go,” Finalist, Reynolds Price International Literary Awards, Center for Women Writers, April 2019

Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, Middlebury, VT, August 15-25, 2018 (General Contributor)

“Homage to Kafka,” First Runner-Up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest, 2017-2018.

VONA/Voices (Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation) University of Miami,

Residency with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, June 19 — June 25, 2016

Folger Institute Faculty Seminar Award, “Observation in Early Modern Europe,” director Lorraine Daston, May 2008

Huntington Library Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, spring 1997

Midwest Faculty Fellowship, Regional Worlds Program of the Globalization

Project (Ford Foundation) at Chicago Humanities Institute, 1996-97

Lilly Foundation Diversity Incentive Grant, spring 1996.

Publications

Love’s Garden, Aubade Publishing, October 2020— Reviewers hail it as “wonderfully dense and wise,” “gripping,” and “a journey into India’s complex past” and ‘what women will do to protect those they love” — an epic saga of Indian women living through a century of war and decolonization — Buzzfeed; Foreword Reviews; Medium.com; Goodreads; Amazon.com; Author’s Guild Author Spotlight; Tupelo Quarterly; The Compulsive Reader

Other Publications

• • • Hindi Cinema:  Repeating the Subject.  Routledge, 2012

The book looks at how cinema presents liminal and counter-modern identities emerging within repeated modern attempts to re-enact traumatic national events so as to redeem the past and restore a normative structure to happenings. Establishing structure and event as paradigmatic poles of a historical and anthropological spectrum for the individual in society, the book goes on to discuss cinematic portrayals of violence, gender embodiment, religion, economic transformations and new globalised Indianness as events and sites of liminality disrupting structural aspirations.

• Slavery, Colonialism and Connoisseurship: Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literary Transnationalism
• “Imagined Subjects: Violence, Law and Citizenship in Indian Cinema”
• “Ethnopolitical Dynamics and the Language of Gendering in Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe”
• “Postcolonial Agency in Teaching Toni Morrison”
• “Family Jewels: George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico and Connoisseurship”
• “Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s Alien: Copy with a Difference”
• “Nation Misplaced: Film, Time and Space in South Asian Decolonization”
• Reading the Splendid Body: Gender and Consumerism in Eighteenth-century British Writing on India