Curriculum vitae

HIGHER EDUCATION

PhD: Research Field: South Asian Studies; Subject: The Bengali Talking Practice of Adda; Institution: School of English, University of Leeds, UK; Start Date: 1^st October 2009; Degree Awarded: 11^th November 2013.

MA with Distinction: Subject: Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies; Institution: School of English, University of Leeds, UK; Start Date: 19^th September 2007; Degree Awarded: 26^th November 2008; Obtained a Record Mark of 94 for my MA Dissertation and Research Methods Module. 

MA (2-year Course): Subject: English; Institution: University of Calcutta, India; Start Date: August 2005; Degree Awarded: October 2007.

BA Honours: Subject: English; Institution: Presidency College, University of Calcutta, India; Start Date: August 2002; Degree Awarded: July 2005.

MOST RECENT PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS

Postdoctoral Researcher; Institution: Department of Cultures, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Finland; Start Date: 1^st January 2019; End Date: 31^st December 2021; Project: 'CALLIOPE: Vocal Articulations of Parliamentary Identity and Empire', funded by the European Research Council (ERC). 

Visiting Research Fellow; Institution: Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London, UK; Start Date: 24^th April 2019; End Date: 23^rd April 2020.

GRANTS AWARDED

Postdoctoral Fellowship:

2013-14: Awarded a fully-funded postdoctoral fellowship by the research programme, ‘Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship’; Institutions: Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, Germany. 

Scholarships:

2009-2012: Awarded the Bonamy Dobrée Scholarship for International Research Students (full fees and bursary) for my PhD programme; Institution: School of English, University of Leeds, UK.

2007-2008: Awarded the Bonamy Dobrée Scholarship for International Postgraduate Students for my MA programme; Institution: School of English, University of Leeds, UK.

SELECTED RESEARCH OUTPUTS AND PUBLICATIONS

Zukunftsphilologie Postdoctoral Project: ‘Post-Partitioning Thakurmar Jhuli and Abol Tabol: The Translated Text, the West Bengali Bhadralok, and the East Bengali ‘Other’’ (Zukunftsphilologie Programme, Freie Universität Berlin, 2014).

Doctoral Thesis: ‘Representing Adda: Radical Capitalism, Bengaliness and Post-Partition Melancholia’ (University of Leeds, 2013).

MA Dissertation: ‘Orality, the Idle Intellectual and Bengali Vernacular Subalternity: Literary and Cinematic Representations of Adda’ (University of Leeds, 2008).

Journal Articles: A Review of Rehana Ahmed’s ‘Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 54.1 (2018), pp. 140-141, Published online (2016) <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2016.1199107>. 

A Review of Alex Tickell ed., ‘South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 53.5 (2017), pp. 626-627, Published online (2017) <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2017.1283726>.

‘Towards a Spatial Practice of the Postcolonial City: Introducing the Cultural Producer’, authored with Katie Beswick and Maya Parmar, in ‘Reevaluating the Postcolonial City: Production, Reconstruction, Representation’, Special Issue, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 17.6 (2015), pp. 789-801 <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369801X.2014.998262>.

Edited Collections: ‘Reevaluating the Postcolonial City: Production, Reconstruction, Representation’, edited with Katie Beswick and Maya Parmar, Special Issue, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 17.6 (2015), pp. 783-892 <http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/riij20/17/6>. 

Description of research and teaching

Esha Sil has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cultures, at the University of Helsinki, for the ERC funded CALLIOPE project, ‘Vocal Articulations of Parliamentary Identity and Empire’, from 1st January 2019 - 31st December 2021. She is currently continuing her association with the CALLIOPE project as a visiting researcher. 

Responsible for the ‘London-Kolkata’ axis of the CALLIOPE framework, Esha has examined the entangled cultural histories underpinning the discursive interplay between British and Bengali practices of vocal articulation and political representation in the long nineteenth century. She has accordingly deployed the human voice as a philosophical prism to re-evaluate Britain’s imperial history through the embodied vocality of colonial Bengali speaking practices. To that end, her work has analysed the speech modes of Kolkata’s nineteenth-century Bengali ‘gentlemen’, better known as the bhadralok, as well as the vocal articulations of a creole Bengali modernity, via the sonic memory of the nineteenth-century Eurasian ‘other’.  

Esha’s research has also delved into the complex vernacular poetics of embodying a postcolonial South Asian life-world, via the everyday language practices characteristic of Bengali modernity. This has facilitated her engagement with a wide range of subject areas from the talking pursuit of adda and the oral folkloric traditions of Bengali nursery rhymes and fairy tales to the polyvocal story spaces of the 1947 Partition and the uneven narrative paradigms of Bengal’s Marxist histories and global capitalist imaginaries.

Teaching: 

Academic Year: 2019-20; Course Title: ‘The Postcolonial City: Identity, Representation and Spatial Production’ (MA Course, Area and Cultural Studies Master’s Programme, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Finland).

Academic Year: 2021-22; Course Title: 'Interdisciplinary Research in Cultural Studies' (MOOC MA Course, Team-Taught by the CALLIOPE Project, Master's Programmes in Area and Cultural Studies & Cultural Heritage, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Finland).