Tannishtha Bhattacharjee

Tannishtha Bhattacharjee is a PhD student in the History Department at UCSB. She holds a BA (Hons.), MA and MPhil in History from the University of Delhi. For her dissertation, Tannishtha investigates the borderland community of Sylhetis and their contemporary culinary culture and communal practices. She is interested in tracing the impact of historical trauma, collective memory and migration on how food becomes a site of articulating and negotiating the question of ‘belonging’. Her interest in these issues stem from her own identity, and her past experience in collecting oral history of India’s Partition from her community for an organization called the 1947 Partition Archive. She maintains a diverse range of academic interests beyond her dissertation’s project. For her MPhil she explored women’s travel writing from 19th century colonial India to understand the politics of gender and circulating material culture in the travel market of the metropole. She has taught in traditional and non-traditional classrooms ranging from middle school to the postgraduate level for five years. She has also worked as a Research Assistant to Professor Anshu Malhotra (Global Studies) and Professor Mary Hancock (History and Anthropology).

She sustains an interest in studying the k-pop band BTS for fandom dynamics, global youth precarity and for the question of creative and affective labour in music. You can read a published piece on BTS and their resistance to global politics of music here. You can also watch her discussing the cultural competency of Western media while reporting BTS as a panelist here.

Some of her semi-academic writing can be found here.

Connect with Tannishtha on LinkedIn.

Learn more about Tannishtha’s research in this short video: