Professor, English

Bishnupriya Ghosh holds a doctorate from Northwestern University and specializes in postcolonial theory and global media studies. Much of her scholarly work interrogates the relations between the global and the postcolonial; area studies and transnational cultural studies; popular, mass, and elite cultures. She has published several essays on literary, cinematic, and visual culture in several collections and journals, and her first two books, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular, focused on contemporary elite and popular cultures of globalization. She is currently researching for a third monograph, The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization that tracks the relations between globalization and cinematic/post-cinematic images. Apart from these works that directly address the question of the “global” in contemporary mediascapes, in the last three years, Ghosh has turned to risk and globalization—or, rather, how the risk media globalize technoscientific rationality. Ghosh interrogates pandemic media across localized contexts, since risk instruments, programs, and institutions are increasingly modular and scalable to global outcomes. Asking how cultural theory at present can respond to highly scienticized forms of risk that are foundational to a managerial globalization, Ghosh returns to the rich archives of “symbiotic living” of high crisis” contexts surfacing at different historical conjunctures the United States, South Africa, and India. The result is a comparative study of pandemic media on the virus, titled The Virus Touch: Living with Epidemics, undertaken on her residency at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, 2012-13.

Select EH Courses: South Asia in the Popular Media and Postcolonial and Ecological Global Imaginations