Dr. Kaustav Bakshi is Associate Professor, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. A Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow, his doctoral thesis, written with partial funding from the Trust, is entitled ‘Family, Sexualities and Ageing in Sri Lankan Expatriate Fiction: Kinship, Power Relations and the State’. 

 

He has published in several international peer-reviewed journals such as South Asian Review (2012), Postcolonial Text (2015), New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film (2013), South Asian History and Culture (2015 and 2017), South Asian Popular Culture (2018) and Café Dissensus (2018).His latest published books include, Popular Cinema in Bengal: Genre, Stars, Public Culture (Routledge, 2020), Queer Studies: Texts, Contexts, Praxis (Orient Blackswan, 2019) and Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art (Routledge, 2015). He is currently working on an anthology Ageing Bodies, Ageist Cultures: Growing Older in India (working title, Routledge) and a special journal issue on Queer Pedagogy in the Indian Academia. 

 

An activist for gender rights, he is a member of the editorial advisory board of Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture (Intellect Bks.), and an occasional contributor to InPlainspeak, the digital magazine of TARSHI (Talking About Reproductive and Sexuality Health in India). He has presented papers in several national and international conferences in institutes such as Columbia University, University of London, University of Connecticut, Syracuse University, City University of New York, European Conference on South Asian Studies (Paris), Jawaharlal Nehru University, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (Simla), Ambedkar University, IIT, Hyderabad, Hyderabad Central University, Delhi University, etc. He was also a visiting fellow at the Department of English, Delhi University in February 2020 teaching postcolonial queer theory to postgraduate students. 

 

At Jadavpur University, Kaustav teaches courses related to gender and sexuality, apart from regular courses on English and postcolonial literatures and cultures.