Teaching
Academic Programmes
5-Year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.)
Courses
July 2023
Nov 2022
Mar 2022
Nov 2021
Elective Course | Religion and Society
Education
BA LLB (Hons.), National Law School of India University – 2006
PhD, Sociocultural Anthropology, Yale University – 2014
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto – 2016-18
Profile
Dr Atreyee Majumder is a political anthropologist. She is the recipient of the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research Grant (2011-12). She has a strong interest in the categories of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘space’ and their mutual imbrications. Her research is geared primarily towards interrogating how capital and the modern sovereign align, and how this nexus expresses itself on space. She has consistently published scholarly articles, and has written in popular venues, on these issues. She also conducts workshops on ethnographic methods for activists and members of the general public. One of these workshops was with the slum youth of Mumbai in order to equip them to conduct research in their neighborhoods.
She is now researching the competing sovereignties between the Hindu God Krishna and the Indian nation-state in the pilgrimage sites in and around Vrindavan (known as the Braj region) in northern India. She is also a published poet, and dabbles in the violin.
Publications
Books
- (with R. Krishnaswamy) Liberalism and its Encounters in India: Some Interdisciplinary Approaches (Forthcoming) (Routledge, 2023) [edited volume]
- Time, Space, and Capital in India: Longing and Belonging in an Urban-Industrial Hinterland (Routledge, 2018) [monograph]
Book Chapters
- “Secularism and its Theological Interior: An Anthropologist’s demand on Faith” in R. Krishnaswamy, Atreyee Majumder (eds), Liberalism and its Encounters in India: Some Interdisciplinary Approaches (forthcoming) (Routledge, 2023)
- “Introduction: Liberalism and Its Encounters” in R. Krishnaswamy, Atreyee Majumder (eds), Liberalism and its Encounters in India: Some Interdisciplinary Approaches (forthcoming) (Routledge, 2023)
- “Mood” in Cymene Howe, Anand Pandian (eds), Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon (Punctum Books, 2020)
- “Ruin” in Raqs Media Collective and Sveta Sarda (eds), Sarai Reader 09: Projections (Sarai Programme, CSDS, 2013)
Journal Articles
- “British Colonialism and Imperialism“, Oxford Bibliographies, Feb 21, 2023 [bibliographic essay]
- Devotee/Ethnographer: My Struggle at the Boundary Walls of Participant Observation, Religions, 2022
- Song of the Sweet Lord Anthropology and Humanism John Wiley and Sons Inc, 2022
- Space and Time through an Urban-Industrial Hinterland, Economic & Political Weekly, 2017
- Kneejerks and Fresh Starts: A History of Speakers and Authors of Protibaad, Socio-Legal Review, 2015
- Introduction: Selves and Society in Postcolonial India, South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (Special Issue: The Ethics of Self-Making in Postcolonial India), 2013
- Calling Out to the Faraway: Accessing History through Public Gestures in Howrah, West Bengal, South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2013
Popular Media
- Locating a Shadowy State in Queer, Feminist Politics, Anthropology and Humanism, 15 July 2023 [commentary]
- Biraha, Anthropology and Humanism, 23 June 2023 [ethnographic poem]
- Francis Cody, The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization, New Books Network, 14 June 2023 [podcast]
- The History of India Is Complex and Complicated. It Cannot Be Neatly Sanitised, The Wire, May 2023 [op-ed]
- Of Speech and Song in the Shadow of Krishna, The India Forum, 22 Feb 2023 [essay]
- British Colonialism and Imperialism, Oxford Bibliographies in Hinduism, 21 Feb 2023 [bibliographic essay]
- Who’s Afraid of Universals?, Anthropological Airwaves (Season 5, E1), Feb 2023 [podcast]
- Decolonization and the Indian University, Law School Policy Review, 11 Jan 2023 [podcast]
- A Storm of Songs, New Books Network, 20 Dec 2022 [podcast]
- On Decolonization: Scattered Speculations on the Indian University, Lokniti Blog, 23 Oct 2022 [essay]
- Love’s Verse: Craving Krishna in Modern Times, The India Forum, 17 Oct 2022 [essay]
- ‘Between Friend and Enemy’ Review of Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Muslim Pasts by Audrey Truschke, India Today, 27 May 2021 [book review]
- On Matter, Manner, Method: Notes on Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities, Law and Other Things, 16 May 2022 [review]
- On Fantasy or Our Mundane Powers of Enchantment, Café Dissensus Magazine, 6 Mar 2022 [Special Issue Editor’s Note]
- The Big Book Project, 2022 to present [podcast]
- Review of Kabir, Kabir by Purushottam Agrawal, India Today, 16 Jul 2021 [book review]
- Mundane Environmentalism and Accumulation-Horizon in India and the Global South, Socio-Legal Review Forum, 10 Nov 2020 [blog post]
- (with Sourabh Balwani and Siddhant Parik) New Notice Latest in Twenty-year Dilution to Green Law, Article 14, 24 Jul 2020 [essay]
- Literary Work and Contemporary Crisis: On Two Novels Concerning India, LSE Review of Books, 15 Jul 2020 [review essay]
- Fieldwork and the Native Informant: A Review of Culture at Large 2017, Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights Blog, 23 Jan 2018 [blog post]
- On Power, Love and Care: Ethnography of the Slum World of Pentecostalism, Economic and Political Weekly, 2018 [book review]
- Review of Hydraulic City: Water and Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai by Nikhil Anand (Durham: Duke UP, 2017). Pacific Affairs 91(2) (2018): 411-4 [book review]
- Friends and Enemies, Seminar, Apr 2017 [essay]
- Secret of the Hills: Temsula Ao’s Account of War as Landscape, Seminar, Mar 2017 [essay]
- Jadunath Sarkar and Archival Anxiety in the Empire, Economic & Political Weekly, 30 Jul 2016 [book review]
- Slow Violence of State Apathy, Economic & Political Weekly, 4 Jun 2016 [book review]
- Review of Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and Fortunes of Migrants by Sunil Amrith (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014). Contemporary South Asia 23(1) (2015): 85-86 [bookk review]
- The Slowdown Perspective, 3AM Magazine, 19 Dec 2014 [essay]
- Review of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America by Vivek Bald (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013). Contemporary South Asia 22.1(2014): 98-99 [book review]
- Review of Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule by Janaki Nair (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011). Contemporary South Asia 21(3) (2013): 339-40 [book review]
- A Switch in Time, 3AM Magazine, 3 Dec 2013 [essay]