Ritam Sengupta

Ritam Sengupta is finishing his PhD in Social Sciences at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His graduate training has been in Cultural Studies at EFL-U Hyderabad and Social Anthropology at SOAS, London. His doctoral project deals with the history of electrification in colonial and post-colonial India over the twentieth century that attempts to foreground transitions in energy regimes as one key to thinking about the political and economic transformations in the region in this period. One part of the project, to be developed at the MPIWG, concerns the coming of electricity to the northern Indian countryside as the energetic basis of irrigating the resource-intensive agricultural development in the middle decades of the century. Ritam has otherwise conducted research projects in association with organizations like the Centre for Internet and Society and Calcutta Research Group on topics of small town urbanity, the "big data" phenomenon and "data centres" in the contemporary Indian scenario and has published some of this research.