Barnita Bagchi (she, her) is Chair and Professor in World Literatures in English at the University of Amsterdam. Educated at Jadavpur, Oxford, and Cambridge universities, she is a Life Member and former Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, a graduate college and centre for advanced studies at University of Cambridge. She comes to the University of Amsterdam from Utrecht University, where she was Associate Professor in Comparative Literature. 

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0230-4716 offers a list of Barnita Bagchi's publications.

University Teaching and Research Qualifications

2017   Senior Qualification in Teaching (Seniorkwalificatie Onderwijs) awarded by Utrecht University, valid across all Dutch universities

2017    Senior Qualification in Research (Seniorkwalificatie Onderzoek), awarded by Utrecht University, valid across all Dutch universities

2019    University Qualification in English-Medium Instruction (Basiskwalificatie Engelstaligheid), awarded by Utrecht University, valid across all Dutch universities

2010    University Teaching Qualification (Basiskwalificatie Onderwijs), awarded by Utrecht University, valid across all Dutch universities

Teaching

Barnita teaches across BA, MA, and RMA programmes, with courses that have focused on fictions of formation and education, modern South Asian literature and culture, speculative, utopian, and dystopian fiction, postcolonial and transcultural literatures, and situated cosmopolitanism in literatures. She supervises theses at all levels.

Research

She is considered an international authority on women's writing and the cultural history of women's education and on utopian studies, in transnational and transcultural perspective, with South Asia and Western Europe as nodes. Her academic work has been awarded prestigious grants and fellowships, inter alia by Jadavpur University in India, the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Germany, Heidelberg University in Germany, the Maison des Sciences de l' Homme in France, CNRS in France, York University in Canada, Trinity College, Cambridge, University of Cambridge, University of Winchester, Lancaster University, and the British Academy in the UK. She has offered Keynote Lectures at prestigious international conferences at the universities of Helsinki, Geneva, and  Winchester, among others.

She is a member of the Board of the Stichting Praemium Erasmianum, which awards the Erasmus Prize, the Netherlands' foremost prize for social and humanistic thought, and which also awards the Research Prizes to some of the best Ph.Ds in the humanities, social sciences, and law, that are awarded by Dutch universities. She is a member of the Utopian Studies Society committee. She is a member of the Steering Group of the Mensenrechtencoalitie Utrecht, the Human Rights Coalition Utrecht. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the journal Utopian Studies.

 Her academic work on the South Asian Bengali Muslim writer Rokeya S. Hossain's female and feminist utopias (articles, book chapters, and a Penguin Classics India critical edition and part-translation of two of Hossain's narratives) is widely used in courses globally. In August 2022, Penguin Random House USA published a fresh edition of Bagchi's part-translation, which was in the NY Times List of 6 new paperbacks to look out for: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/26/books/review/paperbackrow.html

She was a holder of a British Academy Visiting Fellowship at Lancaster University, UK. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/programmes/visiting-fellowships-2018/barnita-bagchi

She initiated and edited a Special Collection on 'Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India' for the Open Library of the Humanities: https://olh.openlibhums.org/collections/special/utopian-art-and-literature-from-modern-india/ This has articles by Barnita Bagchi, Anne Castaing (CNRS, France), Sanghita Sen (St. Andrews University, Scotland), Supriya Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University, India), and Sukla Chatterjee (University of Bremen, Germany).

After having initiated and edited/ coedited, inter alia, two volumes, The Politics of the (Im)Possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered (SAGE, 2012), and Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education (Berghahn, 2014), which are standard and widely cited references in transnational and postcolonial history and in utopian studies respectively, she has edited and published an Open Access volume on Urban Utopias: Memory, Rights and Speculation. The volume has contributions by scholars from UU, Jadavpur University, University of California Los Angeles, University of Amsterdam, University of Cambridge, Leiden University, and the Municipality of Utrecht. Jadavpur University Press, india has published this.

She has guest-edited a Special Issue of the journal Utopian Studies, vol. 33 no.2, subtitled "The Prospective Memory of the Future," which appeared in summer 2022, that brings together her own research, that of collaborating colleagues, and articles from the global utopian studies scholarly community. This is the key outcome of her British Academy Visiting Fellowship at Lancaster University.

Valorisation of academic knowledge 

She appeared on the documentary Kalpavigyan, on science fiction from Bengal, produced by Cofutures, University of Oslo. One can watch the film at https://vimeo.com/522848003

She coinitiated a series of events on Human Rights and Education convened by the Human Rights Coalition in Utrecht.

On 21 May 2021, she organized a mini-symposium on Culture, Rights, and Social Dreaming, https://www.uu.nl/en/events/culture-rights-and-social-dreaming

On 17 September, 2019, she appeared, at the invitation of the Groene Amsterdammer, in a panel discussion in Dutch on Het Nieuwe Feminisme & Literatuur: Wat kunnen moderne feministen leren van literaire klassiekers?", The New Feminism and Literature: What can Feminists Learn from Literary Classics?

https://www.tivolivredenburg.nl/agenda/het-nieuwe-feminisme-literatuur-17-09-2019/

On 15 May, 2019, she organized a workshop on Human Rights and Social Dreaming in the City: What Feminists from Java, India, and the Netherlands Can Teach Us about Utrecht Today.

Book Reviews

Bagchi has since 2002 been a regular reviewer of books, in India for The Statesman, The Book Review India, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, The Telegraph Calcutta, and Economic and Political Weekly, and in recent and current times for journals such as Paedagogica Historica, History of Education,  American Historical Review, Utopian Studies, History of Humanities, the International Institute of Asian Studies Leiden Newsletter, The Beacon, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.