Abhijeet Paul

Abhijeet Paul is a Lecturer in South and Southeast Asian Studies (SSEAS) at UC Berkeley. He also teaches summer courses in Global Studies and in the Berkeley Center for New Media, both at UC Berkeley. He finished his Ph.D. in SSEAS at UC Berkeley in 2015 on technology, ethics, and community in jute cultures. Earlier, in 2003, he finished his Ph.D. in English (American Literature) on the post-1950s writings of Kurt Vonnegut and others from the University of Calcutta. His research and teaching interests are technology and ethics, ethnography, social and critical theory, cinema and globalization, philosophical anthropology, media and cultural theory, new media and democracy, comparative literature and South Asian literature and studies—premodern to present. He is currently finishing his monograph on jute cultures, technology, and ethics called Patchwork technologies: work, ethics, and community in South Asia. He is translating an iconic Bengali jute novel, Jagaddal, by Samaresh Basu and directing a docu-feature on jute craft and poetics in Kolkata, now in post-production. He has most recently been interviewed by NPR on "anger." He is also a contributor to a podcast called SynTalk in Mumbai. He is a regular book reviewer for Critical Inquiry.