Bishnupriya Ghosh

Bishnupriya Ghosh came to UCSB with a doctorate from Northwestern University, a B.A. from Wellesley College, and a B.A. from Presidency College (Kolkata). Her teaching interests are global studies, postcolonial theory and media studies, and gender/sexuality studies. Apart from publishing essays on literature, film, postcolonial criticism and theory in journals such as Screen, boundary 2, The Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and in several anthologies, Ghosh’s first monograph on globalization, literary markets, and the political imagination of South Asian writing in English, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP), appeared in 2004; she has also co-edited a volume of critical essays, Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film (Garland, 1997). She has just finished a second manuscript on contemporary global icons, Corporeal Apertures: the Lives of Global Icons (forthcoming Duke UP, 2009), aimed at rethinking (iconoclastic) dismissals of icons as overexposed mass mediatized commodities as signs through which subjects place social demands. As she completes Corporeal Apertures , Ghosh has started a third book-length project, The Great Vanishing: THe Spectral Modern in South Asia , on a on the spectral economies of the technoscientific imagination in British, German, and Indian visual and literary works. At UCSB she is active in the Multi-Research Group, “The Subaltern and the Popular”; most recently, she is engaged convening a UCHRI short-term research focus group on risk, uncertainty, and globality, “Speculative Globalities,” in February 2007

§ Global studies in the wake of postcolonial theory
§ Marxist cultural theory
§ Twentieth century global literatures in English
§ Transnational film and popular culture studies
§ Gender and sexuality

§ When Borne Across: The Literary Cosmopolitics of the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers University Press, 2004).
§ Interventions: Feminist dialogues on Third World Women's Literature and Film. Edited and introduced by Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., Series on Gender, Culture and Global Politics, ed. Chandra Mohanty, 1997)
§ “The subaltern at the edge of the popular.” Journal of Postcolonial Studies 8.4 (Fall 2005): 459-74
§ “Tallying Bodies: the Moral Math of Arundhati Roy’s Non-Fiction.” Murari Prasad ed. Arundhati Roy: Critical Perspectives (Pencraft International, 2007).
§ “On Grafting the Vernacular: the Literary Consequences of Postcolonial Spectrology.” boundary 2, special issue on “Critical Secularism,” 31.2 (Summer 2004): 214-7
§ “When Speaking With Ghosts: Spectral Ethics in Amitav Ghosh’s Calcutta Chromosome.” In Brinda Bose ed. Critical Essays on Amitav Ghosh (New Delhi: Pencraft, 2003): 117-139
§ “Queering Hindutva: the performances of Hindu icon, Sadhavi Rithambara.” Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power eds., Right-Wing Women and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002): 259-72
§ “Melodrama and the Bourgeois Family: Notes on Mrinal Sen's Critical Cinema.” Sumita Chakravarty ed., The Enemy Within: the Films of Mrinal Sen (London: Flick Books, 2000): 66-97
§ “An Invitation to Indian Postmodernity: Salman Rushdie's Contextual Cultural Hybridity.” Keith Booker ed., Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie (New York: G.K.Hall, 1999): 129-53

Forthcoming Works
§ Corporeal Apertures: The Lives of Global Icons (forthcoming Duke UP, 2009)
§ “The Spectral and the Telepathic: British Occult Fiction, 1880-1920” Victorian Literature and Culture ((Summer 2009):
§ “The Book and the Bazaar.” Derek Mulenga ed. Postcolonial Pedagogies (New York: Palgrave, 2008)
§ “The Bigamous Body of India’s Bandit Queen: Corporeality and the Arithmetic of the Law.” Manali Desai, Piya Chatterjee, and Parama Roy eds. States of Trauma (Zubaan Press, 2008).
§ “We Shall Drown But Not Move: the Ecologics of NBA Documentaries.” Bhaskar Sarkar & Janet Walker eds. Documentary Testimonies: Archives of Suffering" (Routledge 2009).

§ “In Search of Forests: Wresting Human Rights from State Governance” (article)
§ “Cleaning Calcutta into Kolkata: Urban Proxemics and Uncertainty” (article)
§The Great Vanishing: THe Spectral Modern in South Asia (book project)
§Volatile Icons (co-edited collection)

§ South Asia in Popular Imagination Media
§ The Lives of Dead Bodies
§ The Colonial in the Popular
§ Author Troubles: the Strange Case of Salman Rushdie
§ Tarrying with Specters: Studies in Contemporary Fiction