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Staff profile

Overview

Professor Nayanika Mookherjee

Professor

FRSA (Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts)

Affiliations
Affiliation
Professor in the Department of Anthropology

Biography

Photo of all publications

I am a Professor of Political Anthropology in Durham University, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), Co-Director of Institute of Advanced Study (2021-2027) and recipient of the 2025 Rivers Memorial Medal, one of the highest accolades in Anthropology. The Medal is awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute for outstanding contributions to anthropology, with an emphasis on fieldwork and a significant body of theoretical literature.

I ethnographically explore how state violence is evoked and memorialised through an examination of gendered violence during conflicts, war crimes tribunals, irreconciliation and transnational adoption. I suggest ethical ways of documenting these narratives through a graphic novel and animation film. I also engage with archival, visual and literary sources. I have published extensively on anthropology of violence, ethics, aesthetics. In 2024 I was awarded the Durham University Research Supervision award and in 2023 I was shortlisted for the PhD Supervisor of the Year award at the UK 2023 Postgrad Awards.

I did my undergraduate degree ( BA Hons) in political science in Presidency College, Calcutta University (India); my postgraduate degree (MA) in Sociology and Anthropology in School of Social Sciences (CSSS) in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (India) and as a Felix scholar did my Phd (DPhil) in Anthropology and Sociology in School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University, UK. 

Notable publications include:
Spectral Wound

My recent influential edited book is On Irreconciliation (2022, exploring non-forgiveness in the face of injustice in post-conflict contexts) and the concept of irreconciliation has been taken up across social science and humanities and among scholars of mental health, climate change, repair, adoption and other fields. I was invited to deliver the 2023 Raymond Firth lecture on this theme at the ASA (Association of Social Anthropology of UK) annual conference. I am currently exploring irreconciliation in the context of Bangladesh and continuing my research on transnational adoption and conflict (funded by British Academy).

My book The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (2015 Duke University Press, funded by Wenner Gren, foreword by Veena Das and endorsements by Afsan Chowdhury, Jonathan Spencer and Gayatri Spivak), has been widely-reviewed and acclaimed as well as being shortlisted for awards, generating interviews on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed along with various academic and media reviews and honours (finalist BBC’s Thinking Allowed Ethnography Award, American Anthropological Association’s Michelle Z. Rosaldo award). Here are a few chosen reviews of the book:

  • Acutely aware of the methodological and ethical quandaries of attempts to recover or give voice to survivors, Mookherjee offers instead ethnographic accounts of her birangona interlocutors’ everyday worlds as she encountered them. She juxtaposes these to a reading of testimonial cultures that have developed around the figure of the birangona; critical analysis of visual and literary representations; and conversations with a range of activists, including those responsible for “rehabilitating” so-called war-affected women and girls. This is multi-sited ethnography at its best. – Dina Siddiqi, International Feminist Journal of Politics.
  • "[Mookherjee] asks, ‘What would it mean for the politics of identifying wartime rape if we were to highlight how the raped woman folds the experience of sexual violence into her daily socialities, rather than identifying her as a horrific wound?’ That is the central question of this powerful and perceptive book." — Michael Lambek, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute
  • "Mookerjee's exemplary and closely argued The Spectral Wound highlights the central conundrum of making wartime rapes public: heroism, implied and acknowledged by the designation birangona, can only be acquired by making your shame public....[An] uncommonly complex and delicately observed study..." — Ritu Menon, Women's Review of Book

Apart from publishing numerous articles in peer reviewed journals and edited volumes I have co-edited volumes: ‘The Aesthetics of Nation’ (2011 with Christopher Pinney); Aesthetics, Politics and Conflict (2015 with Tariq Jazeel) and edited ‘The Self in South Asia,’ (2013). I have been awarded numerous grants and fellowships by Leverhulme trust, ESRC, British Academy, British Museum and Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation.

I have pioneered collaborative, arts-based methods (which is on the rise in anthropology) by co-authoring a graphic novel and animation film on ethical testimonies of wartime sexual violence (Birangona 2019; see www.ethical-testimonies-svc.org.uk for access) with a Bangladeshi graphic artist  Najmunnahar Keya, based on my book Spectral Wound and received the 2019 Praxis award. Drawing on my research on memorialisation, I am co-leading a project on Absence-Presence of Durham’s Black History and have developed an audio walking tour in Durham Cathedral and city to explore the relationship between Durham’s history of enslavement, mining and imperialism (Durham Cathedral & City Centre | Durham University).

I have also contributed to a publicly engaged anthropology through a panel on ‘On what does the Future Hold’  (with Dr Michael Crawley, Dr Felix Ringel chaired by Professor Simone Abram) on New Writing North as part of Durham Book Festival 2023. Following a specially commissioned podcast series.

JRAI 2022 2011

In 2017, I co-set up and co-chaired Durham University’s first BAME (Black Asian and Minority Ethnic) Network for staff and postgraduate students.

I have extensive ethical expertise: currently as Chair of the Ethics Committee in Anthropology in Durham; was part of the executive committee on Ethics of the World Council of Anthropological Association (WCAA); as the ethics officer of ASA (Association of Social Anthropology of UK) she updated the ASA ethics code which is used by anthropologists and social scientists worldwide.

I have mentored numerous early career researchers, have secured funding  for postdoctoral fellows (by ESRC, British Academy/Leverhulme). I have successfully examined 13 Phd students, co-supervised 13 PhD students to completion (funded by ESRC, DDS, Wolfson, Commonwealth scholarship) and 10 have gone on to gain permanent academic positions or competitive postdocs.

Aesthetics of Nationsgraphic novelBlack History Walking Tour

Research interests

  • (i) public memories of wartime sexual violence;
  • (ii) the role of graphic ethnography in translating difficult stories;
  • (iii) war crimes tribunals and irreconciliation;
  • (iv) memorialisation of past violence and the history of the enslaved;
  • (v) digital surveillance;
  • (vi) transnational adoption and genetic citizenship;
  • (vii) ethics;
  • (viii) South Asia

Publications

Authored book

Book review

Chapter in book

Edited book

Journal Article

Newspaper/Magazine Article

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

Other (Print)

Supervision students

Akshita Mathur

PhD Student

Avarna Ojha

Corruption in India - Evolution through moments of crisis

Dilshaad Hossain

PhD Student

Fahmid Zaid

Fiona MacGregor

Hana Cutts-Smith

Forcible Transfer of Children, Cultural Genocide in Aotearoa (New Zealand)

Navile Navile

Part-Time Teacher