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.

She holds a  Senior Qualification in Teaching (Seniorkwalificatie Onderwijs, 2017), a Senior Qualification in Research (Seniorkwalificatie Onderzoek, 2017), a University Qualification in English-Medium Instruction (Basiskwalificatie Engelstaligheid, 2019),  and a University Teaching Qualification (Basiskwalificatie Onderwijs, 2010).

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.

PhD supervision

Barnita has successfully co-supervised 4 Ph.D. theses, on topics such as literature and human rights, literature and cosmopolitanism, and memories of Sati in 19th-century Britain. She co-supervises 5 PhD candidates currently.

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, Clare Hall, 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, Valencia, and  Winchester, among others. 

Her articles have appeared in a wide array of journals, such as Utopian Studies, Religion and Society: Advances in Research, Mobilities, Paedagogica Historica, New Cinemas, Open Library of Humanities, Mobilities, and Women’s History Review, and she has published numerous chapters in edited volumes, with recent publications in Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures (2022), and Sultana's Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women's Fiction (Routledge, 2022). Her book-length publications include Pliable Pupils and Sufficient Self-Directors: Narratives of Female Education by Five British Women Writers, 1778-1814 (New Delhi: Tulika: 2004), a part-translation with introduction, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Feminist Utopias, by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (New Delhi: Penguin Classics, 2005; renewed Penguin USA edition, 2022), and the edited volumes, The Politics of the (Im)possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered (SAGE, 2012; republished by Atlantic, 2024), and Urban Utopias: Memory, Rights, and Speculation (Jadavpur University Press, open access, 2020).

She was, from 2016 to the end of 2024,  when she completed her maximal terms, 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 governance committee and 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

Valorisation of academic knowledge 

Bagchi is an invited speaker and panelist at a session on Jane Austen at 250 at the International Literature Festival Utrecht, in September 2025.

Bagchi gave a lecture on feminist utopian and dystopian literature, followed by a discussion on the subject with Dr Lenore Todd (Leiden University), at the Kunstmuseum, Den Haag, in June 2025. This was part of the programme of public events round the art exhibition New New Babylon.

She keynoted a session on Feminist Utopias at the International Literature Festival Utrecht in October 2024.

She gave an introduction to the film version, released in 1984, of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, at the Imagine Fantastic Film Festival, in October 2024.

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.

Peer Review

Peer review of academic articles for journals such as History of Humanities, Journal of Victorian Culture, Feminist Formations, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, Postcolonial Studies, Women’s Writing, Itinerario, Utopian Studies, History of Education, Postcolonial Text, Journal of Post-Colonial Cultures and Societies, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, South Asian Review, South Asian Studies. She continues to peer review actively.

Reviewer of book manuscripts and book proposals for presses such as Cambridge University Press, MIT Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, Routledge, Oxford University Press, Berghahn Books, and University of Hawaii Press.

Reviewer of grant proposals for bodies such as the NWO (Dutch Research Council), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada, British Academy, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Netherlands, and the European Commission Horizon Europe Programme.

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.