Postdoctoral Researcher · NUI Maynooth · COLVET Project
Hi, I’m
Dr. Anindita Bhattacharya
I recover forgotten histories and literary voices, explore connections between Irish and South Asian literature and nurture future generation of scholars.
Pillars of
my work.
Archival researcher, published author, and educator — my work spans continents and centuries.
Scholar of Children's and Young Adult Literature
My scholarship bridges Irish and South Asian folklore, fantasy, and postcolonial theory. My forthcoming monograph, The Postcolonial Fantastic: Constructing Irish and Bengali Literary Childhoods, is underway with an expression of interest from Bloomsbury Academic. I explore how authors like Padraic Colum, Ella Young, Upendrakishore Ray Choudhury, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay etc. adapt folkloric traditions to shape juvenile print cultures. My work in this field also extends to published chapters with Edinburgh University Press and Routledge.
Archival Research
As a Postdoctoral Researcher on the COLVET project, I am reconstructing the history of colonial veterans of the First World War. My extensive archival fieldwork across repositories in London, Kew, Lucknow, Delhi, and Kolkata focuses on veteran policies, pensions, and petitions from the inter-war period. I trace the broken promises of imperial bureaucracy, answering the question of what happened to soldiers and their families after the guns fell silent.
An Educator
I am an experienced university educator, bringing my research expertise into the classroom across undergraduate and postgraduate modules. My extensive teaching background includes lecturing at University College Dublin, Dublin City University, Maynooth University and Bray Institute of Further Education. I am committed to creating inclusive learning environments and integrating technology as an instructional tool, which has successfully increased student engagement and participation in my classes.
What I’m
working on.
COLVET — Colonial Veterans of the First World War
COLVET is a four-year interdisciplinary research project led by Prof. Dónal Hassett at the Department of History, Maynooth University, and funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant.
The project’s primary goal is to develop the first comprehensive, comparative history of colonial veterancy during the interwar period. By tracing the evolution and reception of veteran policies across various colonial contexts, the project seeks to reimagine how we understand veterans’ stories and better capture the global diversity of their experiences.
The research is guided by three main questions:
- How was veterancy defined, debated, and demarcated in colonial contexts?
- How were colonial veterans conceptualized as political actors during the interwar years?
- How did colonial states provide for these veterans, and how did the veterans interact with those systems of provision?
As part of this project, I reconstruct the history of forgotten colonial veterans—particularly soldiers from British-ruled India who fought in the First World War. Through extensive archival fieldwork in the UK and India, I examine inter-war pensions, petitions, and veteran policies. Ultimately, COLVET aims to uncover what happened to these colonial soldiers and their families—such as grieving widows—after the war ended, tracing the broken promises and the divide between imperial rhetoric and reality.
Get in touch.
I welcome speaking engagements (in-person and online) on children’s literature, postcolonial studies, folklore, and imperial history. I’m open to collaborative research proposals, conference invitations, editorial discussions, and media enquiries.
Contact me →