Priyanka Basu

Priyanka is a South Asian Studies scholar working at the intersections of literary, cultural and performative traditions, particularly in Bangladesh and India. She is currently completing her first monograph—The Cultural Politics of Folk: Transnational Histories in India and Bangladesh—forthcoming from Routledge UK (South Asian History and Culture Series). Her research focusses on questions of authenticity and transnational cultural politics around folk genres through interdisciplinary approaches of cultural analyses, ethnography and performance histories. She has published on a range of topics including histories of marginal South Asian folk performers, archives and decolonisation, literature and theatricality, women dancers of Second World War, corporeality and film dance, gender and labour in rural women’s craft practices, and contemporary theatre as creative industry. Her research has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as South Asian History and Culture, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Inter Asia Cultural Studies, Cultural Trends, and the Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship. She is currently co-editing two special issues on ‘Print and Islam in South Asia’ and ‘Ecology, Music and Community: Exploring Performance in South Asia’ for the Journal of Royal Asiatic Society and South Asia respectively. Her current research looks at the transnational travel networks of lesser-known South Asian and European cultural performers (theatre artists, dancers, musicians) and how Cold War cultural policies, global conferences (Cuba, Germany, Indonesia) and political agendas of South-South solidarities influences such mobility.