Amrita DasGupta, MPhil

General Email: amritadasgupta58@gmail.com
RCC Email: A.Dasgupta@campus.lmu.de

Amrita DasGupta is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Gender Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS University of London), where she works on her thesis, titled “A Gendered History of the Indian Ocean World: Trafficking and Climate Exile in Port Brothels of the ‘Difficult Geographies.’” Her research sites are the deltaic ecologies that expand from India through Bangladesh to British East Africa where she maps the evolution history of the littoral sexual cultures by means of the creation of port brothels. She teaches at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and she has been a visiting fellow at the King’s India Institute, King’s College London, and has received a full fellowship to be a Visiting Student Research Collaborator (VSRC) in History of Science at Princeton University. She has previously worked on the human-nature relation in Sundarbans, India—world’s only mangrove tiger land—for her MPhil, titled “Bonbibi’s Sundarbans: Tiger Widows and Water-Prostitutes,” a study of the nature-religion-social trinity in the life of an animal attack widow (especially the tiger widow) and its association to coerced migration of the animal widows into sex work from the mangrove margins into the city.

RCC Research Project: Oceanic Violence: Trafficking and Climate Exile in “Difficult Geographies” of the Indian Ocean World

Selected Publications:

• “Deltaic Women of Bengal Reimagining the Forest Rights Act (2006), India.” Monthly Bulletin (April 2023): 41–45.
• “The Scars of History.” In “The Unity of All Things,” ed. Bashabi Fraser, Saptarshi Mallick, and Anindya Raychaudhuri, special issue, Gitanjali and Beyond, no. 5 (2021): 25–29.
• “Hydrocultural Histories and Narratives: Insights from Sundarbans.” Ecology, Economy and Society – the INSEE Journal 3, no. 2 (2020): 169–78. https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v3i2.232. 
• “The Pandemic, A Cyclone: (De)Politicising the ‘Private’ in Bengal.” Economic and Political Weekly 55, no. 39 (September 2020): 20–22.