Professor Nayanika Mookherjee

Professor of Political Anthropology, Durham University

Ethnographic exploration of public memories of violent pasts and aesthetic practices of reparative futures – the state, violence, memory, aesthetics, memorialisation, visual practices, ethics, irreconciliation, adoption and South Asia.

Ethnographic research engages with (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 and (vii) ethics. Published extensively on anthropology of violence, ethics and aesthetics.

Recent publications:

1. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Historicising the Birangona: Interrogating the politics of commemorating the wartime rape of 1971 in the context of the 50th anniversary of Bangladesh.” In Recounting the Memories of Bangladesh’s Liberation War. Routledge (2024), pp. 125-134.
2. Corso, Alessandro, and Nayanika Mookherjee. “The presence of abandonment: Left to live at the borderland of Lampedusa.” American Anthropologist 126.4 (2024): 622-634.
3. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “‘Occupying’ the womb: Disrupted kinship futures and sovereign logics in sexual violence during wars.” Critique of Anthropology 43.4 (2023): 422-443.
4. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Introduction: on irreconciliation.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28.S1 (2022): 11-33.
5. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Irreconcilable times.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28.S1 (2022): 153-178.
6. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Aurality of images in graphic ethnographies: Sexual violence during wars and memories of the feelings of fear.” The Sociological Review 70.4 (2022): 686-699.
7. Islam, Sadaf Noor E., Nayanika Mookherjee, and Naveeda Khan. “‘Medicine in name only’: Mistrust and COVID-19 among the crowded Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 9.2 (2022): 1-32.
8. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Imaging ‘traitors’: The raped woman and sexual violence in the Bangladesh war of 1971.” In Narratives of Mass Atrocity: Victims and Perpetrators in the Aftermath, ed. Sarah Federman and Ronald Niezen. Cambridge University Press (2022), pp. 222-246.
9. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Birangona: Toward ethical testimonies of sexual violence during conflict.” In Profiles of Anthropological Praxis: An International Casebook, ed. Terry M. Redding and Charles C. Cheney. Berghahn Books (2022). pp. 224-236.
10. Lacy, Mark, and Nayanika Mookherjee. “Democracy in scare quotes: The granularity of control in the hybrid state of Bangladesh.” In Masks of Authoritarianism: Hegemony, Power and Public Life in Bangladesh, ed. Arild Engelsen Ruud and Mubashar Hasan. Palgrave Macmillan (2022), pp. 237-246.
11. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “The Birangonas (war heroines) in Bangladesh: Generative resilience of sexual violence in conflict through graphic ethnography.” In Resilience, Adaptive Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice, ed. Janine N. Clark and Michael Ungar. Cambridge University Press (2021), pp. 143-163.