Erica Lynn Mukherjee

Erica Lynn Mukherjee is an environmental historian of South Asia. Her current book project, The Impermanent Settlement: A History of the Actual Water and Soil of Imperial Bengal, uses a material culture lens to explore efforts by the British East India Company to bring material and administrative stability to the watery landscapes of the Bengal Delta. These efforts ranged from property ownership legislation to the construction of infrastructure such as embankments and railways. Using this material approach to environmental history, Mukherjee is developing The Elemental Tours, a series a public walking tours that narrate the environmental history of Manchester through stories of water, stone, fire, and air. Her commitment to public history also includes regular publications on Indian railway history with the Early Railways Committee of the Railway & Canal Historical Society in the UK. At NYU Shanghai she is the faculty course coordinator for Global Perspectives on Society (GPS) and teaches courses in South Asian and environmental history and the humanities.

Select Publications

• Mukherjee, Erica. “Why Study Failure? Lessons from the Life of Rowland MacDonald Stephenson,” in Early Railways, volume 7. eds. Stephen K. Jones and John Liffen, 269-287. Shildon, UK: Early Railways Conference Committee, 2022.

• Mukherjee, Erica. “The Impermanent Settlement: Bengal’s Riparian Landscape, 1793-1846,” South Asian Studies 36:1 (2020), 20-31

• Mukherjee, Erica. “The Engineer in the Tropics: Building the East Indian Railway, 1844-1854,” in Early Mainline Railways, volume 2. ed. Michael Chrimes, 245-268. Croydon, UK: CPI Group, 2019.

Education

• PhD, History
  Stony Brook University