Updates from the IRNPPC Kolkata Conference
The International conference on Anti-Colonial/De-Colonial Text and Print in the Cold War Era: Lives and Afterlives, co-funded by UChicago Provost’s Global Faculty Award 2025, and hosted by the Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, was a huge success!
Scholars of print culture spoke variously on printed texts and images in a wide range of media – from civil service reports to small magazines and newspapers, from pulp fiction to poetry; and from different regions of the world – including Bengal, Mexico, Prague, and Palestine. Paper topics ranged from socialist unities in 1960’s India to sensationalist newspapers from 1950’s-80’s America, from visual reportage in Hungry Bengal to Soviet picture books for children in India, from deep dives into Bengali comics and little magazines, to affective readings of Illustrated Weeklies and Indian parliamentary reports during the Cold War.
You can read more about the conference here.
IRNPPC Members: (from left) Rosinka Chaudhuri (CSSSC), Rochona Majumdar (UChicago), Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (NYU), Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS-UChicago), Elizabeth Holt (Bard College), Jo McDonagh (UChicago), Supriya Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University), Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University), Robert J.C. Young (NYU), Jonathan Sachs (Concordia University).
News about IRNPPC seminars
From March 2025 onwards the online seminar of the network will be hosted jointly by Laetitia Zecchini and by Neelam Srivastava.
We are thrilled to have Chana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge) come talk to us on Friday, 20th June about ‘Revolutionary Papers’, the international research collaboration exploring the impact of 20th century anticolonial and postcolonial periodicals which she co-directs. Stay tuned for the zoom link!
Recent Publications of IRNPPC Members & Affiliates
Chaudhuri, Rosinka. India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire. Penguin Random House India, 2025.
The Locations of (World) Literature. Co-edited by Francesca Orsini and Laetitia Zecchini. Brill, 2025.
Huang, Shih-shan Susan. The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture. Brill, 2024.
Majchrowicz, Daniel J. The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Anisa Fatima, Muhammad Nasir, Hafiz Muhammad, Jahanzaib Zafar, Sobia Fiaz, Marrium Shakoor. 2024. “Examining Pakistani Political Ideology and Print Media: A Critical Discourse Analysis”. Harf-O-Sukhan 8 (3), 120-33.
Other News
Research Fellowship:
The Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge invites applications for two Smuts Research Fellowships in Commonwealth Studies from candidates at the postdoctoral level in all disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.
Application Deadline: April 15, 2025.
More details can be found here.
Scholarships & Contracts:
Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac is soliciting applications for four doctoral scholarships intended to support doctoral students enrolled in at least their third year for the 2025-2026 academic year, at a French or foreign university, and three post-doctoral contracts to young PhDs to develop their work. Application Deadline: April 6, 2025
More details can be found here.
Summer School:
Bookings are open for a week-long summer school course “Modern Political Pamphlets”, offered by Pragya Dhital, which looks at various non-European examples of the form. This is part of London Rare Books School, and is scheduled for Week 2, 23-27 June, 2025. Concessions and bursaries are available for students.
More details can be found here.
IRNPPC website : You can consult our section on digitalized archives here. This is a work in progress, and we welcomes suggestions you may have for us to include in this section.
Gentle reminder: Please send all IRNPPC news that you would like to promote (concerning publications, jobs, conferences, archives, etc) to Shrutakirti Dutta, our intern and web administrator, at shrudutta@gmail.com