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Sreya Chatterjee

Assistant Professor

Sreya Chatterjee specializes in 20 & 21C British, Irish, and South Asian literature, global Anglophone and postcolonial literature, and women’s writing. She is currently working on two related projects: the first, a study of caste and globalization, and second, contemporary Anglophone fiction’s turn to non-fictional cultural history.

Dr. Chatterjee’s first book, Family Fictions and World Making: Irish and Indian Women’s Writing in the Contemporary Era (Routledge 2021) charts the fraught itineraries of the family novel in Ireland and India. Interrogating the notion of women’s writing as “apolitical” through a materialist and feminist lens, Family Fictions posits the family novel as a form that exemplifies a nuanced engagement with the capitalist world-system. It covers fiction by Anne Enright, Elizabeth Bowen, Mahasweta Devi, Jennifer Johnston, Kiran Desai and Molly Keane. In addition, Chatterjee has published essays and book chapters on authors such as Brian Friel, Mahasweta Devi, Laxman Gaikwad, Manoranjan Byapari and others.

At UH, Dr. Chatterjee regularly offers courses on British, postcolonial, and world literature, and feminist theory. She is a member of the English Department’s Empire Studies Collective and an affiliate faculty in the India Studies program. Additionally, Dr. Chatterjee has served as a peer-reviewer for the National Endowment for the Humanities; for presses such as Oxford University Press, Routledge, and Anthem, and international journals such as Interventions, Wasafiri, and Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

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Education

  • Ph.D. in English, West Virginia University, 2017
  • M.A. in English (First Class), Jadavpur University, India
  • B.A. in English (Honours), St. Xavier’s College Calcutta University, India

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Selected Publications

Family Fictions and World Making: Irish and Indian Women’s Writing in the Contemporary Era (New York: Routledge, 2021), 184 pp. Reviewed in South Asian Review 

“Vichian Materialism and the Irish Unrest: Brian Friel’s Translations.” History, Imperialism, Critique: New Essays in World Literature. Ed. Asher Ghaffar (New York: Routledge, 2018), 155-166 

“Begetting Wayward Sons: Naxalite Insurgency and Revolutionary Motherhood in Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084.” Naxalism: Post-structuralist, Postcolonial and Subaltern Perspectives. Ed. Pradip Basu. (Kolkata: Setu, 2017), 78-94 

“Dialectics and Caste: Rethinking Dalit Life-Writings in the Vernacular, Comparing Dalit Narratives.” Comparative Literature Studies (Penn State University Press) 53.2 (2016): 377-399 

“Beyond Barriers: Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Transnational Feminist Solidarity.” Modern Social Thinkers. Ed. Pradip Basu. (Kolkata: Setu, 2012), 91-109

Teaching

English 8364 World Literature and Women Writers (Graduate)

English 7369 Introduction to Postcolonial Studies (Graduate)

English 3365 Postcolonial Literature (Undergraduate)

English 3321 Modern British Literature (Undergraduate)

English 3318 The British Novel Since 1832 (Undergraduate)

English 2316 Literature & Culture: Coming of Age in the Global Novel (Undergraduate)

English 2305 Introduction to Fiction (Undergraduate)