Prof. Dr. Jenia Mukherjee

Jenia Mukherjee is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. She has launched Environmental Humanities as a BTech-level course at the institute. Her research spans environmental history, urban ecology, political ecology, and development studies. Before joining IIT Kharagpur, she had worked at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata between 2010 and 2016. Jenia received the Australian Leadership Awards Fellowship (ALAF) and Australian Awards Fellowship (AAF) in 2010 and 2015 for her research on the chars (riverine islands) of the Lower Gangetic Basin. She was selected as one of the 20 World Social Science Fellows by the International Social Science Council (ISSC) in 2013 for her work on Kolkata's canals and wetlands. She is the editor of Sustainable Urbanization in India: Challenges and Opportunities. Jenia is the Indian principal investigator for the AHRC-ICHR funded project The Hooghly River of Cultures Pilot Project, from Bandel to Barrackpore (2018-2020), as well as a project funded by EU-India (EqUIP) entitled, Towards a “Fluid” Governance: Hydrosocial Analysis of Flood Paradigms and Management Practices in Rhone and Ganges Basins (India, France, and Switzerland) (2019–2022).

RCC Research Project: Changing Trajectories of Blue Infrastructure in Kolkata—Natural History, Political Ecology and Urban Development in an Indian Megacity

Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Blue Infrastructures: Natural History, Political Ecology and Urban Development in an Indian Metropolis

Selected Publications:

• ed. Sustainable Urbanization in India: Challenges and Opportunities. Singapore: Springer, 2018.
• “River and Estuarine Islands: Ephemeral Geographies, Adaptive Communities.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Island Studies, edited by Godfrey Baldacchino. UK: Routledge, 2018.
• “From Hydrology to ‘Hydrosocial’: Historiography of Waters in India.” In The Routledge Handbook of History of Sustainability, edited by Jeremy L. Caradonna. UK: Routledge, 2018.
• “Hydrosocial Implications of Hydropolitical Trajectories: Exploring the Farakka Barrage Project from Indo-Bangladesh Perspectives.” In Groundwater in South Asia, edited by Abhijit Mukherjee. Germany: Springer, 2018.
• with Flore Lafaye de Micheaux and Christian A. Kull. “When Hydrosociality Encounters Sediments: Transformed Lives and Livelihoods in the Lower Basin of the Ganges River.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 4 (December 2018).
• with P. Chowdhury. “Towards Environmental Humanities: Relevance, Approaches, and Agenda within the Indian Context.” E-Qual News 3, no. 5 (September 2016).