Sourav Chatterjee's first book project is titled “Ephemeral Empire: Printing Pessimism in Colonial South Asia.” It draws on methods of literary theory, multimodal studies, and periodical studies to analyze colonial ephemera, including illustrated periodicals, proto-comics, cartoon albums, gags, burlesques, farces, drolleries, facetiae, joke books, and political caricatures. The book examines the production and circulation of various printed ephemera and the role of satire in political representation, legitimacy, and autarky during the anticolonial and non-cooperation movements in India. Sourav's article, “Against Imitation: Anticolonial Caricatures in Basantak or the Bengali Punch,” in Victorian Periodicals Review, won the 2022 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals’ “Expanding the Field Prize,” which recognizes it for expanding research on imperial networks of textual, visual, and discourse dissemination in colonial South Asia.
RESEARCH AREAS
Sourav's research interests are South Asian literary and visual cultures, postcolonial theory, graphic narratives, cultural studies, multimodal theory, and history of print and empire. Before joining Rice, at Columbia, Sourav taught Modern South Asian literature, Asian Humanities: Colloquium on Major Texts, Introduction to Indian Civilization, Global Critical Theory, Gandhi and his Interlocutors, and Global History of Laughter. In 2024, Sourav received Columbia’s Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, which honors teaching excellence at the University. At Rice, Sourav teaches “Film and Society in South Asia” and “The World and South Asia.” He also plans to offer classes like “South Asian Graphic Narratives,” “Gendering Ephemera,” “Global Gandhi,” and “Partition Stories.”
Sourav believes that academic work must be accessible beyond academia to non-academic audiences, which has led him to start a social media-based public humanities project, Antilibrarian, on Instagram. Sourav regularly writes book reviews promoting World Literature and literature in translation to showcase culturally diverse voices and perspectives. Sourav’s public-facing essay titled “The Antilibrary in the Pandemic” outlines the ethics of building a public social media platform to understand how online reading communities on social media are shaping reading habits, university curricula and syllabi, publishing trends, and politics in the twenty-first century. The essay was published in the centenary issue of The Newsletter magazine of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS).