Nabaparna Ghosh

Nabaparna Ghosh is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Babson College. Her research lies at the intersection of urban history, environmental humanities, and Dalit studies, with a particular focus on caste, ecology, and colonial knowledge systems.

Her current book project examines environmental governance in the nineteenth-century Sundarban delta through the lived experiences and knowledge practices of Dalit communities. Drawing on colonial archives alongside scroll paintings, oral histories, and other vernacular forms of environmental knowledge, the project explores how marginalized communities understood and inhabited a landscape in which the boundaries between land and water were continually shifting. It approaches these practices as counter-cartographies that challenged colonial efforts to map, classify, and govern the delta.

Ghosh’s first book, A Hygienic City-Nation: Space, Community, and Everyday Life in Colonial Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2020), examines how everyday urban formations in colonial Calcutta were both shaped by and helped constitute the larger forces of imperialism, nationalism, and urban modernity. It traces the emergence of a discourse of Hindu spatial hygiene and shows how nationalist pedagogies sought to discipline urban residents and cultivate forms of conduct deemed appropriate to life in a city deeply divided by religion and caste.

Ghosh teaches and advises students in urban history, environmental history and humanities, modern South Asian history, caste and Dalit studies, and histories of colonialism and empire.