Phd Visiting Scholar Harjot Banga
Harjot Banga is a PhD candidate in Anglophone Postcolonial Literature at the University of Turin (administrative university: University of Genoa). His doctoral research project, Weaving Empire: A Comparative History and Stories of Biella’s Woollen Mills and Bombay’s Cotton Mills, is situated at the intersection of historical, cultural and literary studies and the Digital Humanities. His work focuses on the industrial and cultural significance of the textile industries, specifically focusing on the cotton mills of Bombay/Mumbai, India, and the woollen mills of Biella, Italy. As part of this project, he translated Pietro Sella’s letters, contributing to the valorisation of Sella’s role in the Italian Industrial Revolution through the associated digital project Bringing the Revolution Home: Pietro Sella's Mechanical Looms, developed within the Open Literature initiative at the University of Turin (). His research engages with Digital Humanities, industrial literature and the politics of culture, while also exploring Environmental Humanities, post- and decoloniality, and subalternity.
From September 2024 to May 2025, he was a Visiting PhD Scholar at SOAS University of London under the supervision of Professor Eleanor Newbigin. He is currently a Visiting PhD Scholar at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University (May-September 2026), under the supervision of Professor Kama Maclean.
He is the author of the monograph Anita Desai’s India: The Religious Plague, Holocaust, Decadence and Remembrance (Ibidem Verlag / Columbia University Press, 2024). His academic publications include articles in Il Tolomeo, Lagoonscapes, and the forthcoming De Genere, focusing on industrial literature, decoloniality, labour studies and gendered resistance. Alongside his academic work, he writes poetry, fiction and literary translations. His recent creative publications include the short story The Sacred and the Starved (Chakkar: An Indian Art Review, 2026), translations of Lalla Romano’s poetry in Usawa: Literary Review (2026), the poems “Ashes of Migrants” (The Hooghly Review, 2025) and “The Koel’s Cry” (Majlis Mag, Cambridge University, 2025), as well as the forthcoming short story The Drowning Man’s Map in Tiger Moth Review.
