Here in the Honors Program, we are incredibly proud of our talented team of educators. The professors in our program come from a wide array of academic disciplines and they are incredibly passionate about the subjects they study and teach. This quarter, the Honors Program is happy to welcome three new professors who will be teaching new Honors courses.
Professor Tuhin Bhattacharjee will be teaching the HON 105 course, “Death and Mourning in Philosophy” this quarter. His work focuses on Sanskrit and Greek philosophy and their relationship with postcolonial feminist and queer theories. Before coming to DePaul, Professor Bhattacharjee received his PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU. One of our blog writers, Allison Scott, reached out to him to find out more about his class and his hopes for the quarter.
Tell us a little about yourself!
I am super excited to be teaching philosophy for the Honors class at DePaul! I was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and completed my college education there before moving to the US in 2017 for my PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University (NYU). As a kid, I was fascinated by the world of ancient myths, which soon transformed into a passion for the most fundamental philosophical questions: How did the universe begin? Does creation have a purpose? Do we have free will, or is everything predetermined? What happens after we die? What is the nature of our dreams?
In time, I became interested in the question of the woman in philosophy. I have been raised by a disabled, working mother who sensitized me to issues of gender early on. A decisive turn towards an academic interest in gender and sexuality came the night I read Euripides’ Greek play Medea while in college. I could not sleep that night. After completing my MA, I taught at a prestigious college under the University of Calcutta for three years, before coming to the US for my PhD. My doctoral dissertation investigates maternal figures in ancient Greek and Sanskrit literature and philosophy to untangle the metaphysics of gender and the politics of reproduction in antiquity. Even though my formal training is in literature departments, the theoretical architecture of my work is deeply grounded in feminist philosophy.
My work received the Mainzer Fellowship in 2021 for conducting research in India. In 2022, I was awarded the Honorable Mention for Best Graduate Essay by the John J. Winkler Memorial. Recently, I was featured as an ‘Emerging Scholar’ by NYU’s Center for Ancient Studies. I have been to Greece and Italy on several fellowships from NYU, and in 2021, the WISLI Scholarship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison generously funded my participation in their immersive Sanskrit program. My essay “Antigone/Mother,” published in philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Transcontinental Feminism (SUNY Press), draws on the work of Adriana Cavarero and Julia Kristeva to challenge psychoanalytic readings of Sophocles’ play that see Antigone as an anti-natal figure. In an essay in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, I examine myths of matricide by focusing on the mother-son pairs in ancient Greek and Sanskrit texts. What fascinates me most about my own work is its comparative dimension, which enables me to bring Western thought in dialogue with non-Western traditions that are underrepresented in philosophy departments in the US. My intervention lies in reading texts from different cultures “diffractively,” that is, in playing these disparate traditions off each other in ways that broaden our disciplinary horizons when doing philosophy.
I am keenly invested in interdisciplinary public-facing initiatives that bring the comparative study of philosophy to a wider modern audience. As an Educational Ambassador for Save Ancient Studies Alliance (SASA) since early 2020, I regularly organize and lead free, weekly reading groups for an international public ranging from high-school students to retired teachers, from Christian pastors to other non-academic enthusiasts. My writing on gender and caste was published in the online anti-caste forum Round Table India, and my myth-busting piece on the Kāmāsūtra has appeared in the public-facing journal Conceptions Review. I plan to launch my YouTube channel ‘Myth and Philosophy’ soon that will make philosophical ideas accessible to a wider public!
Can you tell us about the Honors course you will be teaching in the fall?
Yes, of course! The class is called “Death and Mourning in Philosophy,” though I will cheat a little and include a couple of literary texts as well – but then these are ancient texts that have deeply influenced philosophers, so I might as well be pardoned! The course will introduce students to philosophical modes of thinking about death and mourning. Death has been a key theme in philosophy across cultures. Death will come to us all, and yet, we cannot really experience death. We anticipate death’s approach, but experiencing the moment of death is impossible. No one comes back from the other side to tell us what happened. Or do they? Does the soul continue to live after death? How have thinkers addressed death in their works? How have philosophy and literature approached this radical limit, this “undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns,” as Hamlet poetizes? How do we respond, individually and collectively, to the certainty of death—both of others and of ourselves? How has death shaped practices of grieving? What happens when the state imposes death on a convict? These are some of the questions we will ask in the class as we read texts on mortality, mourning, and the afterlife. The syllabus is very comparative and includes the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato’s Greek dialogues, Sophocles’ Antigone, the Sanskrit Katha Upanishad, Freud’s essay on mourning, and also Krzysztof Kieślowski’s brilliant Polish film A Short Film About Killing.
In your opinion, how does your course relate to DePaul’s Vincentian mission of social justice?
DePaul’s Vincentian mission of fostering a diverse, inclusive, and multicultural community speaks to me very strongly. My commitment to equity and diversity in academia is informed by the experiences I have had as a student and a teacher in both India and the US. Before joining NYU, I taught at this Indian college where, besides other things, I taught English writing to students from rural Bengal. In my conversations with students from poor, rural families, I realized how class remains the one social metric that is often neglected in our discussions on diversity. My view has not radically changed after shifting to the US, as I see huge financial and racial disparity among students, with many having to balance classes with an evening job, even as their mothers work a grueling shift at stores like Walmart. My classes are a space where all of us can feel safe being vulnerable and where critical rigor goes hand in hand with emotional openness. One of my former students recently wrote to me saying how my class had helped him navigate his sexuality and come out to his conservative parents. These little acknowledgments reaffirm the absolute joy of being a teacher, of how one can positively impact a student’s life and thinking, even if in ways that cannot be quantifiably measured.
I am particularly attentive to ensuring greater transparency in academic systems that often alienate immigrants and international students. I have found that simple gestures go a long way, such as providing ebooks and audiobooks, so that students with disabilities can access them and others are not compelled to buy expensive texts. As my student evaluations will attest, I take great care in fostering a respectful classroom environment where students from diverse backgrounds can thrive and that is sensitive to specific student needs as well as to larger exclusionary histories.
If a student leaves your class having learned just one thing, what do you hope that one thing would be?
I would like them to leave the class thinking that close reading philosophical texts can be fun!
Philosophy is often considered an esoteric discipline, but in truth, it addresses questions that we are all grappling with: Who am I? What is the relationship between body and mind? What role do sex, gender, and race play in the construction of the ‘self’? What do androids dream about? I believe in doing philosophy in a way that’s as joyful as it’s profound!
My classes are therefore oriented around themed discussions based on rigorous close reading as well as group work and fun assignments—like the one where I asked my NYU students to write a speculative dialogue between ancient Greek and Indian philosophers (“Socrates and Vātsyāyana walk into a bar,” the assignment prompt began)! The pieces they wrote were of startling quality and reaffirmed my optimism in the generative potential of cross-cultural philosophical dialogue.
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