Prof. Dr. Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha

Home university and country

Institute of Language Studies and Research (ILSR) Kolkata, India and Kazi Nazrul University, India

Short vita

Year of study -        PhD (2012)

Scientific positions or activities

Professor, School of Translation and Cultural Studies, ILSR Kolkata, India since March, 2022
Professor, Department of English, Kazi Nazrul University, since 2017

Important scientific functions and memberships –

• Project Lead, British Library Endangered Archive Programme funded Major Project on „Digitising the Sanskrit Literary Association (Kolkata) archive of ancient Indian knowledge system texts, institutional periodicals, almanacs and miscellaneous personal collections (EAP1718)” to digitize and conduct research at the Sanskrit Sahitya Parishat Archive at Kolkata, (2025-2027)
• Awarded the fully funded Cambridge University Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Visiting Fellowship 2025 for Global South Scholars for his research work on Interfaith Dialogue in Bengal (January – March 2025)
• International Advisory Board Member, DFG Funded Research Training Group on „Aesthetics of Democracy“, Goethe University, Frankfurt (2026 - 2031)
• Awarded the fully funded Fellowship of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris for research visit to the Husserl Archive of École normale supérieure (Paris) (October-November 2025).
• Awarded the fully funded Dr. Liselotte Kirchner Postdoctoral Scholarship 2025 of the Francke Foundations, Halle, Germany for research stay of two months at the Francke Foundation in (July-August 2025)
• Project Lead, British Library Endangered Archive Programem funded Project on „Vernacular syncretism and cultural heterodoxy in colonial Bengal: Digitisation and survey of rare archives at Maha Bodhi Society, Kolkata (EAP1546)” to digitize archival materials and to conduct research at the Maha Bodhi Society Archive at Kolkata, (2023-2024)

• Awarded the fully funded Leibniz Value of the Past Fellowship by the Leibniz Association, Germany for research and visiting professorship at Leibniz Institute Hessian Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research, Frankfurt, Germany, (August September, 2023)

• Awarded the fully funded fellowship at the The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften (an Institute for Advanced Studies) of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany, (October-November), 2022
• Awarded the fully funded 2021 Charles Wallace India Trust Translation Fellowship, British Center for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia, UK (Sept -December, 2021)
• Awarded the fully funded Visiting Guest Research stay for his research on the Postcolonial Public Sphere: Nation and Identity in Linnaeus University, Sweden from August 2019-October, 2019
• Awarded the fully funded Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship 2018-19 for lecturing and research at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA from August-December 2018

 

Duration of the Dr. phil. Fritz Wiedemann-Fellowship at IZEA (Post-Doc)

8 April, 2026 – 3 June 2026

 

Research project

 “The German Oriental Society Archive, Halle and Global Histories of the Cultures of Enlightenment“

Summary

This project comes within the larger rubric of the global histories of Enlightenment, involving histories of science, society and knowledge transfer during and after the 18th century European Enlightenment and its global network of scholarly exchange. Put differently, this project looks into the wider spaces and thought geographies of the Enlightenment or the global constellation of Enlightenment thoughts. This focus on the global interwovenness of Enlightenment culture will facilitate a non-Eurocentric and planetary discourse of the Enlightenment as well. Empirically, this project closely looks into the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft) (DMG) Archive kept at the special archives of the Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg to unpack the important historical roles of the DMG (established in 1845) in actualizing global exchange of scientific ideas and the dissemination of German Enlightenment culture and cross-cultural Pietist thoughts across the globe, especially in South Asia, India. A dialogue between German Pietism and Indian reformist Bhakti movement has tremendous research potential for cross-cultural Pietism studies. The German Oriental Society (DMG) Archive at the University of Halle-Wittenberg contains rare and unexplored archival documents related to the DMG`s highly accomplished scholarly research on the “Orient”. The DMG archive in Halle offers uncharted histories of the world network of scientific studies and German research interest in non-Western civilisations. “Orientalism” as a concept (Said 1979; Dabashi 2009) has remained an area of controversy in the field of postcolonial studies but, leaving aside these stereotyped controversies, this proposed project will adopt a different scholarly, archival and historicist perspectives on German Oriental studies research to unearth its contribution in the promotion of human thought and cross cultural exchange of Enlightenment ideas.

Publications in the field of Global Histories of Enlightenment research

Purakayastha A., with Subhendra Bhowmick, (2025), “Towards Deconstructive Rationality: Pathologies of Reason and Immanentist Counter-discourses”, Book chapter in, Sociology of Rationality: Critiques and Creative Conversations, Eds., Soumyajit Patra, and Tatwamasi Paltasingh, (Routledge, Taylor and Francis)

Purakayastha A., “Literature and the Counterpublics: Restoring the Archive of Sahajiya Sahitya”, Public Humanities (2025), 1, e181, 1–19, Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/pub.2025.10072

Purakayastha A., “Critique in Dark Times: Centenary of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and its Global Relevance”, Economic and Political Weekly (EPW Engage), May 24, 2025

Purakayastha, A., Edited the Critical Edition of The Oriental Christ by P. C. 4 Mozoomdar, Boston, Geo. H. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street, 1883 (New critical edition published by ILSR Press, Kolkata), 2024

Purakayastha A. (2021): “Is Critique Global?: Interlocutions from Excentric Sites of Enunciation”, Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium, 6(1), 2021