Join us for "Deadly Spaces: Haunted Homes and Haunting Histories," an IRW Distinguished Lecture with Tithi Bhattacharya (History, Purdue University). Professor Bhattacharya’s talk will explore why modern Bengali ghost stories tend to be set outside Calcutta in places with older histories, while British ghosts frequent Calcutta mansions giving the city a novel historicity. It is drawn from her new book, Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal, which maps the role Bengali ghosts and ghost stories have played in reconstituting “traditional” Indian religious thought and in bringing such thought into a new relationship with the science and religion of Europe. Amitav Ghosh describes Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence as “the best account I have yet read of the enchanted and uncanny world of stories and beliefs that Bengalis like myself grew up in.”
Tithi Bhattacharya is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of Global Studies at Purdue University. She specializes in Modern South Asian History. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto, 2017) and Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke, 2024). She is co-author of Feminism for the 99% A Manifesto (Verso, 2019).
Cosponsored by the South Asian Studies Program.
Followed by lunch for those who register.
Register here: https://forms.gle/6eufJRzaSSboDgaV9