April 19

10am-12:30pm

Virtual: https://rensselaer.webex.com/rensselaer/j.php?MTID=mb5cb805ebab4784458b0b21f6f9cc2e7

Password: 22VjxXM8pQj

 Prof. Sayan Chatterjee’s presentation consists of two parts: a teaching demonstration and a research talk, both essentially concerned with the literature of societies caught between the forces of traditionalism and socioeconomic modernization. In his teaching demonstration from his Introduction to Literature course “The Long Revolution: Urban Modernity and the Literature of Britain, 1800-1950,” Prof. Chatterjee will deliver three short lectures on three separate texts from his syllabus: Charles Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol, then George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and finally Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark, focusing respectively on three broad thematic strands from the literature of urban Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth century: capitalism and social justice, Victorian gender roles and the emergence of the “New Woman”, and empire and global migrations. The teaching demonstration will also connect and contextualize the three separate lectures within the larger cultural history of Britain in the Victorian and Edwardian eras in the wake of the industrial revolution and imperial expansion. The primary goal of this demonstration, and by extension, the course, is to familiarize students with the canonical works, major authors, and dominant literary concepts of this period, while also concurrently illuminating the social history of Britain and its empire. Following this teaching demonstration, Prof. Chatterjee will speak about his ongoing research for his book manuscript “Morality, Modernity, and the Indigenization of the Victorian Novel in Bengali Literature and Cinema.” This will include an overview of its chapters, methodologies, and scholarly contribution to the fields of global Victorian Studies and Postcolonial South Asian Studies. Additionally, Chatterjee will expand upon his larger research agenda, including current and upcoming publication plans and his second project.