Dr Milinda Banerjee

Dr Milinda Banerjee

Lecturer in Modern History

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2898
Email
mb419@st-andrews.ac.uk
Location
St Katharine's Lodge
Office hours
Thursday 2pm to 3pm or by appointment

 

Research areas

I joined St Andrews in 2019 as Lecturer in Modern History. I specialize in History of Modern Political Thought and Political Theory, post-1700. Originally from Calcutta (India), I had earlier researched and taught at Heidelberg University, Presidency University Calcutta, and Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. At St Andrews, I am Programme Director for the interdisciplinary MLitt in Global Social and Political Thought.

I specialize in the intersections of Indian/South Asian and global intellectual history and global political theory, as well as in political and economic theology. My doctoral dissertation has been published as The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2018). I have co-edited volumes on royal nationalism, dynasty, and legal thought in relation to modern global history. I have written about canonical Indian and European political thinkers, examining the globalized production and circulation of ideas about state sovereignty, nationalism, democracy, property, and religion. Introducing perspectives of Subaltern Studies into debates on global intellectual history, I have centre-staged subaltern intellectual history, examining the political and social thought of peasants, Adivasi/Indigenous actors, and refugees. My most recent research focuses on rethinking human-nonhuman relations in the age of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. I have been working with academics and broader communities in Bhutan to conceptualize frameworks of multispecies democracy. Initial results have come out as a book co-authored with Jelle J. P. Wouters, Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being against the Capitalocene (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2022; with commentaries from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Marisol de la Cadena, Thom van Dooren, and Suraj Yengde).

I am founder-editor of a new series with Cambridge University Press, South Asian Intellectual History. I am Special Projects Editor of the journal Political Theology (Routledge), and the founder-editor of two series with De Gruyter, ‘Critical Readings in Global Intellectual History’, and ‘Transregional Practices of Power’. I welcome queries from potential doctoral students interested in any aspect of modern British imperial and global intellectual history, early modern and modern Indian/South Asian history and/or thought, and connected histories of Scotland and India. I am also happy to (co-)supervise broader interdisciplinary work on multispecies politics.

PhD supervision

  • Mashuang Tian
  • Minke Hijmans
  • Ewan Jenkins
  • Amber Bourke

Selected publications

 

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