Arna Dirghangi

Profile

I am a PhD scholar at the School of Fine Arts, History of Art and Culture Studies (FAHACS) where my research is fully funded by the Arts, Humanities and Culture (AHC) full-time Doctoral Scholarship at the University of Leeds, 2024-2027. 

I graduated from Presidency University, Kolkata with a BA (Hons) and MA in English in 2021 and 2023, achieving a first-class-first rank during my undergraduate degree. I am an Oral Citizen Historian with the 1947 Partition Archive since 2021, where I recorded my maternal grandfather’s oral narratives about his childhood migration and post-Partition resettlement from the former East Pakistan to West Bengal. In my capacity as an archival and research intern under the Kolkata Partition Museum Trust in 2020 under the project Chronicling Resettlement: Digitizing the Prafulla K. Chakrabarti Papers, I became familiar with the implicit methodologies of digitally archiving oral memory narratives. I enjoy working on Translation Studies in practice. In the past, I have worked as a Bengali-English translator for the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Govt. of India from April to December 2022. I have volunteered as an English-Bengali translator at The People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), since October 2021. 

Research interests

The influence of the digital in the 1947 Partition’s inheritance is central to my doctoral study. A significant part of my research places itself at the intersection of Digital Humanities, Orality, Memory Studies and Critical Heritage Studies to answer the question: what does the idea of digitality do to such oral renditions of the 1947 Partition’s living memory? My work is at the intersection of Postmemory, Ethnography, Inheritance and the Digital Archives of the 1947 Partition. I am particularly interested in the 1947 Partition's Inheritance through its next generations and that reflection in digital archives. I aim to answer the question while situating my methodological vectors amongst the ephemeral space of the digital, with the hope that it opens up an earlier unexplored image of envisioning the 1947 Partition in light of digital memory and culture; where both digital spaces and memory are constantly shaped by and shape reimagination and reinterpretation. 

Qualifications

• MA English, Presidency University, Kolkata, India
• BA (Honours) English, Presidency University, Kolkata, India