Barnita Bagchi, Lecturer in Human Sciences
Dr. Bagchi received her Ph.D. from Trinity College and the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, in 2001. She obtained a B.A. in English from Jadavpur University (placed first in the first class) and a second B.A. and M.A. from St.Hilda's College, Oxford (securing a first class).
As a post-doctoral member of faculty at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, she worked on gender, education, especially women's education, human development and social capital : she is committed to using narrative to analyse these issues.
She has conducted field-based interviews on adolescent girls' education in Murshidabad in West Bengal ( Grassroots cheap cigarettes , April 2002). Her article written after conducting relief and observation work in Gujarat after 2002 carnage has appeared in Of Lofty Claims and Muffled Voices, ed. by Flavia Agnes (Mumbai: Majlis, 2002). She has been involved in a study supported by UNDP to follow up the Maharashtra Human Development Report.
A paper she presented at the Indian History Congress in Mysore (2003), 'Gender, History, and the Recovery of Knowledge through ICT ' is forthcoming in a volume on the History of ICT. She has published on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's educational narrative and work (Urdhva Mula, 2.2, 2003).
Dr. Bagchi's first book, Pliable Pupils and Sufficient Self-Directors: Narratives of Female Education by Five British Women Writers, 1778-1814 (New Delhi, Tulika, 2004) examines writings focusing on female education and development by five representative British women writers, who wrote or published between 1778 and 1814. Her translations of Bengali literature into English have appeared in The Impermanence of Lies (Stree, 2003), The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India (Stree, 2003), and Talking of Power (Stree, 2003).
At IDSK, Dr. Bagchi is preparing a critical edition, commissioned by Penguin India, of educational utopian narratives by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. She is also working on another monograph on 'Ladylands and Human Development', continuing her field-based work on girls' education in West Bengal, and researching gendered social capital.