Animesh Chatterjee is a historian of science, technology and the environment whose research focuses on the multifaceted meanings and affectual interpretations of technologies, spaces, climate, weather and weathering practices in the colonial context.
Animesh received his PhD in History from the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies at Leeds Trinity University in July 2020.
PROJECTS
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Weathering Colonial Calcutta: Climates, Cultures and Everyday Experiences of the Weather, 1800 - 1945
Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral project at the Greenhouse Centre for Environmental Humnaities, University of Stavanger.
Project No.: 101061421 funded by the EU Horizon MSCA PF 2021 programme
Weathering Colonial Calcutta explores an urban, material and cultural history of colonial Calcutta as a story of changing ideas about, and everyday experiences of the weather. The project offers critical insights into the differential and multi-layered interactions between scientific knowledge-making and literary production of the weather, and also reveals everyday experiences of the weather as cultural acts infused with meanings that were socially constructed and historically specific. It highlights a culturally and spatially specific way of tracing not just what the effects of the weather were, but also how people felt and lived, thereby mobilising historical research and writing to enrich public engagement with climate change.
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The Social Life of Electricity in Colonial Calcutta, 1875 - 1945
Book Manuscript forthcoming with Routledge
Begun as a doctoral project at Leeds Trinity University and the University of Leeds, and developed as a postdoctoral research fellow (November 2020 to December 2022) in the European Research Council project “A Global History of Technology, 1850-2000” (Project No.: 742631) at Technische Universität Darmstadt, the book studies the history of electric supply and technologies in the ambivalent and complex social, cultural and political environments and processes of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century Calcutta. It offers a rich analytical account of the material of politics and the politics of material that influenced the manner in which electricity was introduced, resisted, adopted, rejected, used and, in some cases, misused in public and domestic spaces. More importantly, it examines the ways electrical technologies created new spaces, reconfigured geographies and brought into contact distinct individuals, social groups, and ideas. Drawing on a range of hitherto unexplored archival and non-archival sources, the book presents a more intricate history than has been available, not just of electricity in the context of colonial India and Calcutta, but also the everyday experiences of material cultures and energy use.