Apurba Chatterjee

I am a historian of the British Empire, with a particular interest in its cultural politics ranging from the late seventeenth to mid-twentieth centuries. As a researcher, educator, and public history expert, I am interested in power relations, representations, and their legacies for public life today. Drawing upon a variety of disciplinary methods, including art history, science, the history of medicine, literary studies and postcolonialism, my work focuses on bringing marginalised voices from the past to the surface. With experience in higher education, archival research, and the museum sector, I have a wide-ranging perspective on the role that academics can play in intervening for a more just and enriched future.

I completed my PhD in History at the University of Sheffield in 2020, thereafter working at German Maritime Museum as a International Research Fellow. I have also held a visiting fellowship at British Art Center, Yale University in 2018. From 2021-2024, I was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Humanities and Social Science at the University of Reading.

My first monograph, An Empire of Images: Visual Culture and the British in India, 1688–1815, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. It focuses on the visual arts as central to the making of political legitimacy during the long eighteenth century. Through images by both British and Indian artists, this book explores how peoples, landscapes, flora, and fauna in India became part of an imperial self-image. Torn between open triumphalism and anxious contingency, British artists and patrons sought to dissect India's mysteries and justify East India Company rule under the Crown. Meanwhile, Indian artists interpreted the realities of British hegemony in terms of both their native cultural resources and modes introduced by the colonizer. Tracing an emerging imperial ideology on canvas and in prints, as well as the pages of official archives and personal papers, this book offers new insights into reconfigurations of power in a period of European expansion in Asia. As Chatterjee argues, early colonial India became a site for contestation around British visual ascendancy, which must complicate our own understandings of honour, guilt, knowledge, and belonging.

My current research is based on my Wellcome-funded project ‘The Art of Colonial Medicine: Visual Cultures of Malaria in India, 1890-1940’. It examines images – drawings, diagrams, photographs, maps, and charts – as central to inquiry into malaria, investigating their influence on tropical medicine’s institutionalisation. Imagery in the public sphere, such as Bengali and Hindi posters and cartoons, meanwhile helped alternately to strengthen and shape resistance to imperialism. With a focus on interactions between the arts and sciences, this project is the basis of my second monograph, offering a new, inclusive approach to the historiography of British colonial medicine, anti-colonial movements, and modern South Asia. An article on this subject, 'Visual representation, medicine, and imperialism' was published in The Lancet in 2023.