Prof. Nilanjana Mukherjee has taught English Literature to undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Delhi, India, for close to twenty years. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her work, so far, has involved questions of space, place, landscape, and cartography in literary narratives and visual cultures. She especially engages with the history of British imperial transactions in South Asia and traces connections with the present. Apart from these, she is also interested in studying intersections of discourses on gender with nationalism, Bangla literature, Indian art movements, mobilities, architecture, and public spaces.
She has authored the book, Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India (Routledge: 2020). She has also co-edited the volume, Mapping India: Transitions and Transformations 18th-19th Centuries (Routledge: 2019). She is the recipient of the Delhi University Foundation Day Award 2021 for Teaching Excellence and of the Meenakshi Mukherjee Memorial Prize 2015 for her journal article, ‘Drawing Roads, Building Empire: Space and Circulation in Charles D’Oyly’s Indian Landscapes’, from the Indian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. In the past, she was the Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and a doctoral fellow at King’s College, London.
She has widely published on themes focused on space, place, and mapping in Indian and international scholarly journals of repute. At present, she is working on a study of the Indian Desert as a spatial imaginary in its evolution as a frontier zone in North-West India. She expects to take the deliberation forward to explore dimensions such as nature-human-animal and environmental concerns, through her collaborations with peers as an awardee of the Bajaj Visiting Fellowship at the Mittal Institute, Harvard University, in fall 2024.
Her participation in international networks include a project themed on ‘Communal Geographies’ from which a special issue of research papers was recently published in the journal, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. She is also a nodal member of another budding global research network based at Regensburg University, Germany, titled ‘Imaginaries of the State’ (to be developed for funding).
