Supported by the New York Public Library, Penn State Humanities Institute, American Institute for Indian Studies, the American Institute for Bangladesh Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the CAORC Multi-County Fellowship Program, the U.S. Library of Congress Tan Moeson Fellowship Program, the Fulbright U.S.-UK Scholar Program, the University of Victoria Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, the Canada Research Chair program, the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, and the Bogliasco Foundation, my work focuses on the history of globalization, religion, literary culture, decolonization, and migrations in global and comparative contexts. Trained as a modern South Asian historian and alive to debates in cultural studies, post-colonial studies, political theory, and globalization, my research is organized into four major thematics:

Histories of nationalism and decolonization
With a grounding in modern South Asian history (c. 1750 – the present), my research focuses on the history of Bengal, inclusive of Company, Colonial, and National time periods. My first book, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Oxford, 2014), xplores nationalism in late colonial Bengal through the lens of Bengali Muslim cultural history in the twentieth century. I remain interested in histories of nationalisms, nationalist  social movements, and the historical creation of nation-states in the era of decolonization.

Histories and theories of religion
This area features an investment in the history of religions as well as religion as a tool for social critique and transformation. My recent book, entitled Chips from a Calcutta Workshop: Comparative Religion in Nineteenth Century India (Cambridge, 2025), explores the development and nature of comparative religion in nineteenth-century India. It focuses on the ideas of a range of thinkers who explored comparative religion in India, drawing on a variety of inspirations from Indian religions. Rather than emanate out of a European Christian set of politics as in the Western world, comparative religion emerged out of religious reform movements, including the Brāhmo Samaj in Bengal and the Arya Samaj in the Punjab. With chapters on Rammohan Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Keshab Chandra Sen, and Swami Vivekananda, the book includes a re-evaluation of familiar figures alongside lesser-known thinkers within an intellectual history of modern Indian comparative religion.

Migration in global and comparative historical perspectives
Focused on the historical experiences of South Asian migrants in various guises – indentured laborers, merchant capitalists, professionals, pilgrims, radical anti-colonialists – within the modern world system (c. 1830 onward), my particular interests focus on how South Asian migrants traverse and make the world system. Published work in this area includes my edited volume South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives, based on the University of Victoria Global South Colloquium workshop, Between Indigenous and Immigrant: South Asian Migrations in Global History as well as articles in BC Studies and the edited volume The United States and South Asia from the Age of Empire to Decolonization: A History of Entanglements (Leiden, 2022).

Recently, I have served as a felllow in the Past Wrongs, Future Choices SSHRC Partnership project focused on Japanese internment during World War II in global perspective. As a part of this fellowship, I have completed two collaborative scholarly writings on Japanese internment during the twentieth century in comparative contexts, with reference to South Asian migration histories and histories of expulsions related to South Asia and South Asian diasporas.

Literature in global and historical perspective
I research and write about aesthetics, literature, theater, and performance in the context of modern and contemporary globalization. Recent work includes India after World History: Literature, Comparison, and Approaches to Globalization, an edited volume exploring the links between global history and world literature studies, based on a collaborative set of workshops at Northwestern University’s Center for Global Culture and Communication and at the University of Victoria’s Global South Colloquium.

 

nbose@uvic.ca

Department of History Clearihue B234