Contributor, South Asian Studies
Sunayani Bhattacharya is Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her research is on emergent media in the Global South where she specializes in book history and radio technology. Her expertise is in manuscript and print text encoding, with an emphasis on Bengali. She also works on digital and sound archiving, exploring ways of organizing material that are ephemeral.
Sunayani’s PhD is in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon on practices of novel reading in 19th century Bengal which became the foundation for her first book, The Novel in 19th Century Bengal: Becoming Readers in Colonial India (Bloomsbury, 2023). She has worked as a Research Fellow at the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, where she was involved in encoding late 19th century manuscripts for the Charles Harper Critical Archive. Her current research is at the juncture of radio and sound studies, as she examines the ways in which communities learn to listen to audio media, and participate in soundscapes.
The Digital Orientalist 