PhD (History), Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,Calcutta and Jadavpur University | MA (Social Anthropology) School of Oriental and African Studies, London | MA English (Cultural Studies), English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad | BSc (Hons.) (Economics), Presidency College, University of Calcutta
Ritam Sengupta is Assistant Professor, Jindal School of Art and Architecture, 91̽. He specializes in the study of infrastructure, energy, the environment and digital media through the lens of history, media studes, and anthropology. His PhD thesis that he is developing now as a monograph focuses on the ways in which colonial and postcolonial rule impacted the development of electricity in Indian cities. His post-doctoral research, initiated as part of a European Research Council project, revisits the history of seasonality and agriculture in the Indian subcontinent. He has otherwise studied digital infrastructure like data centres and laws of data protection through a political economic and ethnographic lens. Some of this work has come out in the form of a volume he co-edited, titled, Data Centres as Infrastructure: Frontiers of Digital Governance in Contemporary India (Orient Blackswan, 2022).
2022
[Peer Reviewed] Sengupta, Ritam. “Keeping the master cool, every day, all day: Punkah-pulling in colonial India”, vol. 59.1, pgs. 37-73, January, 2022. Indian Economic and Social History Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/00194646211064592
[Peer Reviewed (Co-Edited)] Jha Manish and Ritam Sengupta. Data Centres as Infrastructure: Frontiers of digital governance in contemporary India, Orient Blackswan, 2022. https://orientblackswan.com/details?id=9789354422652
[Peer Reviewed (Co-Authored)] Sengupta, Ritam and Manish Jha. “Introduction: The state in/of Data Centres in India” in Data Centres as Infrastructure: Frontiers of digital governance in contemporary India’, eds. Manish Jha and Ritam Sengupta, Orient Blackswan, 2022, pp. 1-38.
[Peer Reviewed] Sengupta, Ritam. “Between control and ‘feedback’: Narrating the digitised operations of a ‘captive’ Electricity Data Centre in West Bengal, India”, in Data Centres as Infrastructure: Frontiers of digital governance in contemporary India’, eds. Manish Jha and Ritam Sengupta, Orient Blackswan, 2022, pp. 88-127.
Book Reviews: Sengupta, Ritam. Review of Sarkar, Suvobrata: Let there be light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880-1945. Cambridge University Press. 2020, in: H-Soz-Kult, April 12, 2022. https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-96862
2019
[Peer Reviewed (Co-Authored)] – Heeks, Richard, Vanya Rakesh, Ritam Sengupta, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Christopher Foster. “Datafication, Value and Power in Developing Countries: Big Data in Two Indian Public Service Organisations”, vol. 39, pgs. 1-25, October, 2019, Development Policy Review. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dpr.12477
2017
[Peer Reviewed] – Sengupta, Ritam. “The Small Town in India: ‘Subaltern Urbanisation’ and beyond”, vol. 50, pgs. 58-79, 2017, Refugee Watch: A South Asian Journal on Forced Migration.
http://www.mcrg.ac.in/rw%20files/RW50/RW50.pdf
[Co-authored] – Sengupta, Ritam, Richard Heeks, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Christopher Foster. “Exploring big data for development: An electricity sector case study from India”, Development Informatics Working Paper 66 (2017). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3431737
Sengupta, Ritam. “Concepts in Logistics” (in Bengali). In Logistical Worlds: Infrastructure, Software, Labour – No. 2, Kolkata, Eds. Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, pp. 101-110 (Open Humanities Press, London, 2017. – http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Neilson-Rossiter_2017_Logistical-Worlds-Kolkata.pdf)
