Bhaswati Bhattacharya

• E-mail: bbh@iisg.nl
• Department: Research Fellows

Part-time lecturer, Faculty of Arts and History, Erasmus University

Courses taught: Globalization and History; Comparative Area Studies (South Asia)

Coordinator, Asia-Link Project, Leiden University

A heritage project initiated at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and funded by the European Union. The project involves making a documentary on Indo-Dutch heritage.

Reviews editor, The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient

Research Project: Colonial Commodities and Indigenous Modernity: Tea and Coffee in Asia, 1850- 2000 (tentative title).

New commodities/drinks are linked with the rise of modernity in the West--industrial time, work discipline, notions of nation/empire, urban life, practices of gender, class and family. The main question is: What has been the long-term impact of the process of adopting modernity on the production relations?

Has taught different courses on socio-economic history of South Asia in the modern period and international commerce in the Indian Ocean in the early modern period in the university of Leiden, the Netherlands and Rabindra-Bharati University, Kolkata, and Vidyasagar University, Medinipur, West Bengal India

Areas of interest: Socio-economic history with special reference to commercial networks; Indian Ocean commerce / global history in the early modern period; networks of Armenian commerce; culture of production and consumption of colonial commodities

Other activities: Has collaborated as advisor and researcher with the production of two documentaries on the Nobel Prize winner Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore: Rabindranath Tagore (OHM, 1995), and 'Wie kijkt er door mijn ogen' (Feniks Film Company (2007) Free lance translator for asylum seekers, especially from Bangladesh.