Texas Christian University
Biographical Sketch: Preeshita Biswas is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in English literature with graduate certifications in Women and Gender Studies and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at TCU. Supported by a MLA Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship, Curran Fellowship awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, and the LKH Fellowship in English presented by TCU, Preeshita's doctoral dissertation reveals often-obscured intimate and trans-imperial relations—multidirectional experiences of cooperation, competition, and connectivity—that shaped British and Japanese imperialism in South and Southeast Asia and the simultaneous emergence of Bengali nationalism from 1850 to 1950. Making critical inquiries into a constellation of archival, literary, and cultural texts, the project challenges conventional archives of imperial histories and foregrounds non-white and non-heteronormative scribes and characters of intimate imperialisms. Her study answers the call from scholars like Zarena Aslami, Lars Atkin, Sukanya Banerjee, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, and Matt Poland to adopt a “multisite, multilingual, and polyvocal vision” of the dynamic Victorian period by expanding both inward and outward to enhance our understanding of geopolitical entities relatively new to this interdisciplinary field. The dissertation dismantles three conventional structures that confine the capacious Victorian era within the temporal and geographic peripheries of the British empire: rigid periodicity, which constricts this labile period to a narrow chronology; constrained territoriality, which restricts it to the spatial margins of British-ruled terrains; and limited relationality, which fails to recognize the divergent networks of multiple empires, geopolitical regions, and nations.