About Rounak Bose

My name is Rounak Bose, and my pronouns are he/him. I am a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware, and I have moved to the United States from my far-flung riverside hometown in the suburbs of West Bengal in India, called Chandannagar. While it was a big jump, it has only been exciting and I look forward to what is in store and training myself in the discipline and beyond it. I completed my Masters in Sociology from the University of Hyderabad in 2022, and since then up until last year, I had been working as a Research Assistant to Dr. Uday Chandra on the European Research Council project "India"s Politics in its Vernaculars" while being affiliated to King's College London and Georgetown University Qatar. Throughout the project, I worked as an ethnographer in the borderland areas of West Bengal and Bangladesh to look at the intertwining of migration, circulations, and mobilities that are informed by low-caste religiosities of the Matua Namasudra sect. I was fortunate to work with the textual, sensory, and performative archives of this sect and look at how their religiosity played a role in the way they negotiated their mobilities and circulations between the borders between India and Bangladesh and the oceanic routes across the Indian Ocean. I had proposed a continuation of this work as my PhD topic, and I look forward to delving deeper in this and discovering newer landscapes of knowledge and research. My research interests remain religion, caste, performance, mobilities in South Asia and Indian Ocean networks.

Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores questions of caste, religiosities, sacred infrastructures, and performance in the interstices of the colonial and postcolonial state, as well as mobilities and circulations across South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific interests, his disciplinary interests revolve around anthropology, literature, and public history, and the digital humanities. When not reading or writing in the university library, Rounak can be found running along Newark's hiking trails and petting the dogs he meets along the way.

NBN Episodes hosted by Rounak:

October 28, 2024

Quinine's Remains

Townsend Middleton

Hosted by Rounak Bose

What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of Ind…