Name: Nilkantha Pal
Email: palnbmhs@gmail.com
Name of Supervisor: Dr. V. Rajesh
Research Focus: My doctoral research will focus on an academically neglected part of the Bengali literary sphere during the colonial period, the contours of which were delineated by various vernacular children’s periodicals. On the whole, it will probe into two interrelated issues: firstly, the material culture of these periodicals for children – the cultural ecology, including the political economy, of their production, circulation, consumption and transformations within a colonial print economy and market of Bengal; and secondly, as a new print medium and cultural artefact, the intervention of these in the existing communicative practices between the adult and the child in the new middle-class domesticity of colonial Bengal, where the space of adult-child relationship was undergoing changes because of the new ‘imagining’ the child as a separate social category at a particular historical juncture.
Education: Introduction to Modern Social Thought (PhD course-work audited at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 2022-23)
Master of Arts in History, Jadavpur University (2021)Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History, Jadavpur University (2019)Fellowship/Scholarship: UGC-NET JRF
Title of Thesis: Children’s Periodicals in Colonial Bengal: Childhood, Readership and Bengali Print Culture, c. 1880-1950
Achievements:
2024: Selected for the Expanding the Field Prize of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals for my essay titled “Imagining Childhood in Colonial Bengal: Children’s Periodicals, Readership, and Vernacular Publishing, ca. 1880-1920.”
2024: Awarded Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship in Printing History 2024 by the American Printing History Association
2023: Awarded a Minor Research Grant (₤250) by the Bibliographical Society, London, for a research trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh.
2021: University Gold Medal for standing First in order of merit at the M.A. Examination in History, Jadavpur University, 2021.
2021: Ratnalekha Roy Memorial Silver Medal for standing first in History at the M.A. Examination, Jadavpur University, 2021.
2020: Qualified West Bengal State Eligibility Test (SET) for Assistant Professor in History, January 2020.
2019: Qualified UGC-National Eligibility Test (NET) for Assistant Professor and Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in History, December 2019.
2019: University Gold Medal for standing First in order of merit at the B.A. Examination in History (Honours), Jadavpur University, 2019.
2019: Umacharan Sen Memorial Gold Medal for securing the highest marks at the B.A. Examination in History, Jadavpur University, 2019.
Publications:
Pal, Nilkantha. “Fathers in a Motherland: Imagining Fatherhood in Colonial India by Swapna M. Banerjee, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. xvii+317, ISBN: 9789391050245.” Gender and History. (Book Review).