Bipasha Bhattacharyya
Bipasha Bhattacharyya is a fourth year Phd Student (Department of History) as well as Trinity College’s Prince of Wales Student. She was a Prize Research Student in the year 2022 at the Center for History and Economics, Cambridge, and continues to be an actively engaged in its proceedings. She also co-covened the Faculty of History's World History Workshop for the academic year 2022-2023.
Bipasha's PhD thesis, provisionally entitled Esperanto and the Search For a Universal Language in British South Asia c.1887-1947, is the first study of the migration, movements and meanings of the international language Esperanto in British South Asia as a case that illustrates the many ways in which language functions in empires.
Bipasha read history at Presidency University, Kolkata. Her MA thesis (‘Hope is a thing with feathers: Lakshmiswar Sinha and the Search for Indian Esperantos’, Presidency University Press, 2021) attempted to give voice to a pioneering history of Esperanto usage in the early twentieth century Indian subcontinent through the lens of a forgotten Bengali Esperantist, carpenter and playwright. During her time at Presidency University, Bipasha successfully revived the once defunct peer-reviewed student journal ‘Presidency Historical Review’ and served as its executive editor. She initiated a successful campaign to preserve and catalogue a disintegrating archive owned by Presidency University. This effort is today supported by a generous endowment by the British Library Endangered Archives program.
Language politics, histories of international movements and of ideas, newspapers as historical sources, critical biographies, micro-history
Historical Argument and Practice (HAP) Lecture on ‘Nations’,(Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, 6th March 2024, 4-5pm)
Introduction to Historical Thinking (IHT 1B) Lecture on ‘History and Biography’(Trinity College, University of Cambridge, 9th February 2024, 4-6pm)
O11: The Twentieth Century World(Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, Oct 2023- June 2024)
POL 8: History of Political Thought c. 1700 – c. 1890(Faculty of Political Science, University of Cambridge,Oct 2023- June 2024)
HPS Paper 2: Science, State and Society in South Asia(Faculty of History and Philosophy in Science, University of Cambridge, Oct 2023- June 2024)
“Esperanto and the Gandhi Cult: Hagiographic Legitimation and Moving Universalisms”, Center for History and Economics, University of Cambridge, 4th March, 2022
“Hindujo and the Sindhwads: Belgian Esperantists on India", Conference on “Transnational Societies and Organisations and New Sociabilities” Campus Condorcet, Paris-Aubervilliers, 5th to 6th July, 2023
“Gandhi and the Uses of Esperanto", Conference on “Mapping multilingual (counter-)expertises: Scientific and political knowledge production across borders in the long twentieth century” University of St. Andrews, 23rd-24th August, 2023
“Esperanto’s Social Histories: The Sergei Alekseyev-Ina Tillman Correspondence”, Joint Doctoral Workshop on “The Present and Future of Social History” Centre for Historical Research, EHESS, Paris,21st-22nd September 2023.
Chair of ‘Who Do We Think We Are? The Left Today’, A Round-Table Hosted by Trinity College, University of Cambridge, 25th September, 2023, Winstanley Lecture Theatre, 5:30-7:30 pm.
“Esperanto, Science, and South Asia: Contact Zones of a Universal Language”, British Society for the History of Science Postgraduate Conference, University of Warwick, Coventry, 19-20 April 2024
“South Asia and Scientific Languages”,in “Looking at the words: Science and Language” Panel, European Society for the History of Science 11th Annual Conference, Barcelona, 4th-7th September 2024
“Mapping Esperanto in India”, Esperanto in Asia Conference, University of Hong Kong, 30-31st, August 2024.
(Forthcoming) Esperanto and Empire: South Asias’ Search for a Universal Language, John Buchanan Lecture, University of Liverpool, 5th March 2025.
(Forthcoming) Panelist, ‘Linguistic Activists: The Politics of Artificial Languages in the Twentieth Century, European Social Science History Conference, Leiden, 26th-29th March 2025.
(Forthcoming) Empire and Language from Above and Below: Esperanto in British South Asia, Historical Sociolinguistics Network Conference, University of Bristol, 21st-23rd May 2025
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Key publications
ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
"Two Books on Visva-Bharati", Zeitschrift für Indologie und Südasienstudien, Band 40 (2023): 155-169.
"Hindujo and the Sindhwads: Belgian Esperantists on India", Esperantologio / Esperanto Studies 13, Nova serio 5 (2024):97-121.
“M.K Gandhi and the uses of Esperanto: Language as a tool for coercive state-making”, Language Problems and Language Planning, 2024
(Forthcoming) "Constructing Languages of Intellectual Co-operation: Evidence from The League of Nations" in David Karlander and Monica Heller ed. Constructed Languages and the Sociolinguistics of World Making. Oxford University Press: Studies in Socio-linguistics, 2025.
SHORT COMMUNICATION AND NON-ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
‘The Methodology of Feyerabend’s Against Method’, Doing History in Public blog, June 4th 2024: https://doinghistoryinpublic.org/2024/06/04/the-methodology-of-feyerabends-against-method/
'The Milk Bottle Children', EKL Review, April 2021.
“Half Real Dream”, Delhi Poetry Slam 2020