Tithi Bhattacharya received her
Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies
(University of London) in 2000. Her dissertation on the
English-educated middle class of nineteenth-century Calcutta
became the basis of her first book, The Sentinels of
Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in
Bengal (Oxford, 2005). In this she focused on a very
specific aspect of the middle class’s social history: their
obsessive preoccupation with culture and education. The book
starts from a rooted definition of education and demonstrates
how education and culture were frequently aligned to social and
economic power. Bhattacharya uses class as an analytic category
to argue that the commentaries about education and being
educated in colonial Bengal ought to be seen as key arguments in
staking out the territory of a new emergent middle class.
Professor Bhattacharya’s work has been published in leading
journals such as the Journal of Asian Studies,
South Asia Research and New Left Review.
Her next book project is titled “Uncanny Histories: Fear,
Superstition and Reason in Colonial Bengal”. It is an attempt
to write a material history of fear and to show how new
historical processes -- rural to urban migration, English
education, new funerary practices-- changed the very cultural
inflections of fear as a colonial society negotiated its
encounter with modernity.
Professor Bhattacharya teaches courses in South Asian history,
Colonialism, Critical Theory, and Histories of the dead and the
undead.
Despite her use of Marxism as a theoretical tool, and her
commitment to complete human liberation, at home
Dr. Bhattacharya is forced to live
a life of complete servitude to her cat, Cleveland the Valiant,
who is sometimes kind enough to afford her certain minimal
rights as guaranteed by the Geneva Convention.
