Soumen Mukherjee

Assistant Professor

Soumen Mukherjee studied history at Presidency College (BA, Honours) and the University of Calcutta (MA), and earned his doctoral degree in the History of South Asia from the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University.

His research interests and publications are in the fields of religious and intellectual history of modern South Asia. His first monograph, Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia: Community and Identity in the Age of Religious Internationals (Cambridge University Press, 2017), received the 2021 Karim and Rosemin Karim Prize for its contribution to understudied areas of Ismaili Studies. His (forthcoming) second monograph (titled Religion, Mysticism, and Transcultural Entanglements in Modern South Asia: Towards a Global Religious History, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) explores the location of spirituality and mysticism in modern Indian religious and intellectual life, with particular reference to their cosmopolitan transcultural links since especially the early twentieth century. He is the editor (with Christopher Harding) of a special issue titled ‘Mind, Soul and Consciousness: Religion, Science and the Psy-Disciplines in Modern South Asia’, South Asian History and Culture, 9, 3 (2018), subsequently reprinted as an edited volume by Routledge (2019) and, more recently, of a forthcoming collection titled Empire, Religion, and Identity: Modern South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Brill, 2024). Moreover, two other edited collections (of which he is the editor and/ or co-editor) in the fields of Indic religions and philosophy, and esoteric and mystical traditions in modern Asia are in their different stages of development.

He has been recipient of doctoral scholarship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and a number of prizes and grants since his Undergraduate and Graduate years. His most recent awards/ fellowships/ prizes include the Annemarie Schimmel Fellowship of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London (2023), and Karim & Rosemin Karim Prize (2021). He is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland and, in 2017, he was an academic visitor at the Dialogue Institute, Temple University, Philadelphia, within the rubric of the exchange programme of Study of the U.S. Institute for Scholars on Religious Pluralism, under the auspices of the Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs, United States Department of State.

Before coming to Presidency University in 2013, he was a Research Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (now Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient) and taught at the Institut für Islamwissenschaft, Freie Universität, both in Berlin.

He teaches courses in the fields of social, religious, and intellectual history of modern South Asia with a particular reference to their transregional and global contexts and ramifications. He also supervises BA, MA & PhD dissertations on a wide array of themes in the above areas.

As part of service to the field as well as outreach activities, he serves as member of international editorial advisory board of leading refereed journal and as academic reviewer of journal articles, books, book proposals and manuscripts etc. for various peer-reviewed journals of global standing, and international publishing houses, such as Cambridge University Press; Oxford University Press; Routledge; Sage.

For further details, please refer to the abridged CV available on this page. For more information, please see: ORCID: 0009-0001-0859-5235 ; Scopus Author ID: 56316817500 and Vidwan profile.

Address

Presidency University,
86/1 College Street, Kolkata - 700073,
West Bengal, India

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Email: soumen.his at presiuniv.ac.in
alternate E-mail: soumenmukherjee26 at googlemail.com

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Presidency University
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86/1 College Street
Kolkata 700073

Presidency University
(2nd Campus)

Plot No. DG/02/02,
Premises No. 14-0358, Action Area-ID
New Town
(Near Biswa Bangla Convention Centre)
Kolkata-700156
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