Nilanjana Bhattacharjya

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. Her dissertation 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, and how British Asian music’s aesthetics relate to British Asian contemporary visual art. Most recently she has co-authored  (with Monika Mehta, Film and Communication Studies, University of Texas, Austin) an article on the Indian state’s historical efforts to monitor the circulation of Bollywood film music; it will appear in 2005 in an edited collection on Bollywood soundtracks, published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Nilanjana has a PhD in Musicology from Cornell University, where she also earned her masters in 1999. She graduated with honors at Wellesley College, where she earned her B.A in 1996; 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 last year as the Five College Fellow.