Janam Mukherjee

Janam Mukherjee is an Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was also a post-doctoral fellow in the Agrarian Studies program at Yale University. Dr. Mukherjee's book, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, incorporates extensive archival and oral history research to draw structural links between war, famine, social upheaval, and civil violence in mid-20th-century Bengal. He has published and presented papers widely on famine and war in mid-20th-century India, including articles in the Bengali newspaper Anandabazar Patrika and The Daily Star (Dhaka, Bangladesh). He also is engaged in comparative famine studies, most notably with the Holodomor Research and Educational Consortium, and has published essays on empire and famine in this context. Dr. Mukherjee has published critical essays on Bengali literature, particularly the works of the anti-establishment Bengali writer Subimal Misra. More recently, Dr. Mukherjee served as a primary historical advisor on, and is featured in, the award-winning BBC Radio 4 documentary series on the Bengal famine of 1943, “Three Million.” Other areas of research interest and publication include analyses of the 21st-century American Empire and the Covid-19 lock-down in India in 2020. Currently, he is working on a complex narrative detailing his personal engagement in Kolkata, India, the city of his father's birth, chronicling the historical period of the 1940s in Bengal from intimate and experiential perspectives. Professor Mukherjee is also an anti-war activist, musician, and creative writer. In this last capacity, Mukherjee has recently “guerilla-published” a philosophical novel, Sanyasi: The Old Man's Tale.