Barnita Bagchi is, from 1 August 2023, Chair and Professor of World Literatures in English at the University of Amsterdam, and was previous to this Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where she worked for fourteen years. Prior to this, she worked at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata in India.

Barnita is a feminist translator, literary-cultural critic, and cultural historian.  She has published widely on utopia/ dystopia, histories of transnational and women’s education, fictions of formation and education, and women’s writing in western Europe and south Asia.

Educated at Jadavpur, Oxford, and Cambridge universities, she is a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Her articles have appeared in a wide array of journals, such as Utopian Studies, Religion and Society: Advances in Research, Paedagogica Historica, New Cinemas, Open Library of Humanities, Mobilities, and Women’s History Review. She has published numerous chapters in edited volumes, a few recent ones being ‘South Asia’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures, ed. Peter Marks, Fátima Vieira, and Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); ‘The Differentials of Gendered Social Capital in Indian Literary-Educational Activism, 1880–1930: Renewing Transnational Approaches’ in Women, Power Relations, and Education in a Transnational World, ed. Christine Mayer and Adelina Arredondo (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); and ‘Utopia’ in Critical Terms in Futures Studies, ed. Heike Paul (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Her book-length publications include a part-translation with introduction, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Feminist Utopias, by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (New Delhi: Penguin Classics, 2005; renewed Penguin USA edition, 2022);  an edited volume, The Politics of the (Im)possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered (SAGE, 2012), and another edited volume, Urban Utopias: Memory, Rights, and Speculation (Open Access, Jadavpur University Press, 2020). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0230-4716 offers a comprehensive list of Barnita Bagchi's publications.

Barnita’s current projects include research on ageing and women in South Asia (with 20^th and 21^st century memoirs, essays, and fiction as sources), on transcultural utopia and its afterlives, recent dystopian fiction analyzed from transcultural perspectives, and on the resonances of Jane Austen’s fiction in colonial and postcolonial South Asia.