I was trained as a post-colonialist interested in problematizing the discipline of history and historiographical constructions/elisions from a postcolonial perspective, with specific reference to cultural praxes and issues of contingency and agency. In my doctoral thesis, which was published as a book, I explored the representational dynamics of three Third-World intellectuals (Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha) in the First-World academy. Interested in the cultural and social histories of nineteenth-century South Asia and Bengal in particular, I went onto to research the relatively unexplored figure of the nineteen-century kerani in Calcutta, which evolved into a monograph published by Routledge in 2020. My most recent work, published with Cambridge University Press, is an intellectual biography of the mid-nineteenth-century rationalist Akshay Kumar Dutta, an often ignored and under-studied figure in the intellectual history of nineteenth-century South Asia. It marks a shift from my engagement with the categories and conceptual frameworks of postcolonial thought to an exploration of issues of globality and the global in conversation with the global turn in intellectual history. I am currently editing a volume of translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories, to be published by Oxford World’s Classics later this year.
BA English (University of Calcutta, 1997)
MA English (University of Calcutta, 1999)
PhD English (Jadavpur University, 2008)
Sumit Chakrabarti received his PhD in December, 2008 from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Department of British and Commonwealth Studies, University of Lodz, Poland, from February 2009 to February 2011. He was a United States, Department of State sponsored academic visitor at The Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society, the University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA from June to August, 2009.
My current research is focused on the intellectual and cultural history of nineteenth-century Bengal.
Administrative Experience:
Head, Department of English, Presidency University (October 2015 to November 2018).
Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences (interim): July 2022-December 2022.
At Presidency I teach courses on Postcolonial Literatures, Modern European Literature, Literary Theories, William Shakespeare and Rabindranath Tagore at the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels.
I have supervised M.Phil dissertations on the fiction of Amitav Ghosh, Renaissance Bengal, and Harold Pinter. At the moment there are seven doctoral scholars working with me on their projects ranging from the holocaust to modern British fiction, Sri Lankan cli-fi to the indigenous fiction of the Sunderbans.
Member, Postcolonial Studies Association, United Kingdom.
Member, Board of Studies, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University.
Member, Board of Studies, Department of Film Studies, West Bengal State University.
Member, Board of Research Studies, Department of English, University of Calcutta.
Member, Board of Research Studies, Department of Comparative Indian Languages and Literature, University of Calcutta.
Member, Post-Graduate Board of Studies, Department of English, University of Burdwan.
Member, Post-Graduate Board of Studies, Department of English, University of Kalyani.
Member, Board of Studies, Department of English, Aliah University.
Member, PhD Research Committee, Department of English, Jadavpur University.
Member, PhD Research Committee, School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University.
Member, Board of Studies, Department of English (DDE), Rabindra Bharati University.
Member, Post-Graduate Board of Studies, Department of English, West Bengal State University.
Member, Board of Research Studies, Department of History, Presidency University.
Member, Board of Research Studies, Department of Bengali, Presidency University.
Member, Governing Board, Institute of Language Studies and Research, Kolkata.
Member, Governing Council, Vidyasagar Academy.
Member, Governing Body, West Bengal State Book Board
Books:
Monograph:
1. Local Selfhood, Global Turns: Akshay Kumar Dutta and Bengali Intellectual History in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.)
Podcast: https://newbooksnetwork.com/akshay-kumar-dutta-and-public-culture-in-nineteenth-century-bengal
Reviews:
Nilkantha Pal
Samarpita Mitra
2. The Calcutta Kerani and the London Clerk in the Nineteenth Century: Life, Labour, Latitude (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).
Reviews:
By Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian
By Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarty
By Prof. Ankhi Mukherjee
By Prof. Jayanta Sengupta
3. The Impact of the Postcolonial Theories of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha on Western Thought: The Third-world Intellectual in the First-world Academy (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2011).
Critical Editions:
Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories [Oxford World's Classics] (Under contract with Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2026).
Unish Sataker Kerani Katha: Soteek Kerani Darpan o Kerani Puran (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 2022)
Edited Volumes:
Postsecular Theory: Texts and Contexts by Shuhita Bhattacharjee (Orient Blackswan, 2022) [Series Editor]
Jacques Lacan: From Clinic to Culture by Mahitosh Mandal (Orient Blackswan, 2017) [Series Editor]
Feminisms by Arpita Mukhopadhyay (Orient Blackswan, 2015) [Series Editor]
The Post-Marked World: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century. Eds. Krystyna Kujawinska-Courtney, Sumit Chakrabarti and Izabella Penier (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing, 2013).
Articles in Edited Volumes:
‘White But Not Quite: Mimicry as Strategy in Doris Pilkington’s Under the Wintamarra Tree’ in David Dunstan, D.N. Bandopadhyay, Shibnath Bannerjee (eds.) Australian Studies: Reading History, Culture and Identity, (New Delhi: Worldview, 2010), pp 202-210.
‘Reclaiming Postcolonial Identity: Cultural History as Enunciation in the Writings of Homi Bhabha’ in Kacper Bartczak and Malgorzata Myk (eds.), Theory That Matters: What Practice After Theory (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing, 2013), pp 69-78.
‘Towards a Critique of Foundational Historiography: A Brief Look at Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi’ in In Other Words: Dialogizing Postcoloniality, Race and Ethnicity, (eds.), Ewa Luczak, Justyna Wierzchowska, Joanna Ziarkowska, (Franfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), pp.125-36.
Papers in Journals:
'Space of Deprivation: The Nineteenth Century Bengali Kerani in the Bhadrolok Milieu of Calcutta' in The Asian Journal of Social Science 45 (2017), pp.55-72.
‘Scattered Reflections on Exile: A Critique of Nussbaum’s Cosmopolitanism and Derrida’s “City of Refuge”’ in The Visva-Bharati Quarterly, Vol.22, Nos. 3&4, Oct.2013-March2014, eds. Tapati Mukhopadhyay and Amrit Sen, (Shantiniketan: May 2014), pp.32-41.
‘Moving Beyond Edward Said: Homi Bhabha and the Problem of Postcolonial Representation’ in International Studies: Interdisciplinary Political and Cultural Journal (Lodz: University of Lodz Press, 2012), pp 5-21.
‘The Public Intellectual as Exile: Representing the Self in Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah’ in the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen (Vol.V, Issue 1, Autumn, 2011), pp.119-32.
‘A Postmodern Subalternity: Towards a Critique of Foundational Historiography’ in the Journal of the Department of English, University of Calcutta (Vol. XXXIV, Nos. 1&2, 2007-2008), pp 16-25.
‘Re-Locating the Woman: Gayatri Spivak and the Politics of First World Feminism’ in the Journal of the Department of English, Rabindra Bharati University, (Vol. IX, 2005-06), pp12-19.
Reviews:
Review of Labyrinths of Language: Philosophical and Cultural Investigations by Franson Manjali in Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research,Volume 32, Issue 2, pp. 279-282. (Springer: 2015),
Presidency University Students Corner