Assistant Professor · Department of English
Swati
Moitra
Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Gurudas College, University of Calcutta. My research spans book history, women's histories, and early Indian writing in English. In recent years I have grown increasingly drawn to environmental and urban history — to the question of what cities remember, what they forget, and what gets buried under concrete and silence. I am especially interested in how ordinary people and overlooked landscapes carry histories that formal archives leave out.
Research
Current Project · Funded Research
Do Canals Have Histories? Environmental Heritage Between Memory and Forgetting in the Eastern Periphery of Kolkata
A public-facing environmental humanities project examining the ecological and cultural memory of canals on Kolkata's eastern periphery — waterways that once shaped the rhythms of everyday life and are now vanishing from both landscape and living memory. Funded by the JPN National Centre of Excellence in the Humanities, IIT Indore.
Public Engagement · Heritage Walk
Beliaghata Heritage Walk, Gurudas College
Curated and led by Swati Moitra, with the support and funding of Gurudas College, this heritage walk took students through the historic sites of Beliaghata — including the house where Mahatma Gandhi stayed in August 1947 — bringing environmental and urban history out of the classroom and into the city streets.
Read coverage in The Telegraph India →Selected Publications
Will the 'Real Reader' Please Stand Up? 'Bookishness' in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines
South Asian Review, July 2024 · Peer-Reviewed International Journal
Journal Article 2024View publication →
A Nineteenth Century Bengali Housewife and Her Robinson Crusoe Days: Travel as Intimacy in Kailashbashini Debi's 'The Diary of a Housewife'
Feminismo/S, 36, December 2020 · Departures and Arrivals Special Issue · Peer-Reviewed International Journal, Open Access
Journal Article 2020View publication →
"Yes, the Evil Queen is Latina!": Racial Dynamics of Online Femslash Fandoms
Co-written with Rukmini Pande · Transformative Works and Cultures, 24, 2017 · Peer-Reviewed International Journal, Open Access
Journal Article 2017View publication →
Reading Together: 'Communitarian Reading' and Women Readers in Colonial Bengal
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 32:3, 2017 · Peer-Reviewed International Journal
Journal Article 2017View publication →
Fellowships & Awards
CRASSH Visiting Fellowship for Scholars from the Global South
University of Cambridge
SHARP Research Development Grant for BIPOC Scholars
Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing
Sahapedia-UNESCO Project Fellow
Sahapedia & UNESCO
Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow (Short-Term)
Charles Wallace India Trust
Junior Research Fellowship (JRF)
University Grants Commission (UGC)
Blog
Your First Post Title Goes Here
A short line summarising what this post is about — a thought, update, or reflection.
Notes on [Topic You Care About]
Another post — perhaps from a conference, a paper you read, or a teaching moment.
A Third Post or Announcement
News about a publication, an event, a talk, or anything you want to share publicly.
Contact
Personal Email
sm@swatimoitra.netInstitution
Gurudas College, University of Calcutta