Nilanjana Bhattacharjya

Assistant Professor of Music, 2006-
Instructor of Music, 2004-2006

Education:
B.A., Wellesley College, 1996
M.A., Cornell University, 1999
Ph.D., Cornell University 2006

Email: nbhattacharj@coloradocollege.edu
Office: Packard 108
Tel: 389-6558

Nilanjana Bhattacharjya ’s research focuses on popular music and its relationship to globalization and cultural identity. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how contemporary South Asian diasporic musicians in Britain relate to mainstream British popular culture and the world music industry. More generally, she is interested in how music changes its forms and cultural affiliations as it circulates through both formal and informal networks, and adopts different technologies.

In the past, she has presented papers at national conferences on topics including the early twentieth-century dancer Uday Shanker’s role in constructing Indian national culture, women’s roles in contemporary British Asian music, the aesthetic relationship between British Asian music and contemporary visual art, and the role of the film song sequence in Bombay films. Most recently she has co-authored (with Monika Mehta) a chapter on the Indian state’s historical efforts to monitor the circulation of Bollywood film music in the edited collection, _Planet Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Songs and Dance_, published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Nilanjana has a PhD in Musicology from Cornell University, where she also earned her masters. She graduated with honors at Wellesley College, where she earned her B.A. At Wellesley, she was awarded the Billings Prize and wrote her senior honors thesis on the harmonic language in Schubert’s C Major String Quintet. She has taught previously at Cornell University and at Mount Holyoke College, where she served as a Five College Fellow.