Chandak Sengoopta
Biographic Data
| ID | 1115007 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chandak Sengoopta |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chandak |
| FAMILY NAME | Sengoopta |
| SIGNATURE | SENGOOPTA C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Birkbeck, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5315-7878 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Through Agnostic Eyes
Examining the filmmaker Satyajit Ray's engagements with religious questions with reference to his films Devi (The Goddess), Mahapurush (The Holy Man), Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), Sadgati (Deliverance) and Ganashatru (A Public Enemy), this essay assesses the influence of Ray's Brahmo inheritance, his personal atheism/agnosticism and his cultural fascination with Hinduism in his representations of women's status and caste discrimination. It co…
Global Forensic Cultures
Reviewed by: Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era ed. by Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin Chandak Sengoopta Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin, eds. Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. x + 346 pp. Ill. $64.95 (978-1421427492). This volume illustrates how handsomely historians are making up for their earlier neglect of forensic ideas, t…
Shinjini Das. Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India
The historiography of colonial science and medicine has expanded remarkably over the last few decades, with India, for understandable reasons, playing a stellar role in this literature. The long, complex history of British rule in the subcontinent offers a vast range of topics crying out for investigation by historians of science and medicine, and while many of these have been studied in great detail from different perspectives, a lot remains vir…
Between Emulation and Innovation
Using the example of Upendrakishore Ray (1863–1915), a well-known Bengali artist, writer, technologist and publisher, this essay critiques prevalent theories that portray colonial Indian modernity as a largely derivative discourse. Addressing Ray’s globally recognised contributions to the refinement of technologies for the printing of photographs and paintings, the article shows how Ray’s relative lack of resources could not obstruct his innovati…
The Contours of Affinity
This paper seeks to demonstrate the complexities of the Tagorean legacy through a re-examination of Tagore's influence on the filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Reappraising Ray's brief period at Santiniketan and some of his most celebrated engagements with Tagore, the essay argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, Ray was not a wholehearted follower of Tagore but a critical and creative interlocutor. The nuanced interpretation of his relationship with …
The fruits of independence’
Challenging the longstanding consensus that Satyajit Ray's work is largely free of ideological concerns and notable only for its humanistic richness, this article shows with reference to representations of British colonialism and Indian nationhood that Ray's films and stories are marked deeply and consistently by a distinctively Bengali variety of liberalism. Drawn from an ongoing biographical project, it commences with an overview of the nationa…
The Universal Film for all of us, everywhere in the world’
Berlin Electropolis
Reviewed by: Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity Chandak Sengoopta Andreas Killen . Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity. Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, no. 38. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. viii + 295 pp. $49.95, £32.50 (0-520-24362-5). Around the middle of the nineteenth century, as telegraph cables began to girdle the planet and the potential utility of elec…
A Passion for Diphthongs
I wish this piece could begin like Orhan Pamuk's novel The New Life: 'I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.This was the kind of light within which I could recast myself; I could lose my way in this light; I already sensed in the light the shadows of an existence I had yet to know and embrace'.My historic passion (such as it is) did not, alas, announce itself with any grandeur.I was pushed, to be sure, into 'an existence I had yet t…
Otto Weininger
Book synopsis: Turn-of-the century Vienna is remembered as an aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual world: the birthplace of Freud and psychoanalysis, the waltz, and novels of Schnitzler. The contexts of this cultural vibrancy, Chandak Sengoopta argues, were darker and more complex than we might imagine. This provocative, enlightening study explores the milieu in which the philosopher Otto Weininger (1880-1903) wrote his controversial book Sex and …
One Hundred Years of Masochism
During the initial boom years of the history of sexuality, so much scholarly energy was devoted to the history of homosexuality that it often seemed that nineteenth-century sexology had constructed no other perversion. At long last, these other Others are beginning to emerge in the annals of scholarship. Masochism has had a good run recently, and the present volume of essays should raise its profile further
Castration
The construction of masculinity being so high on the research agendas of all kinds of scholars, it is scarcely surprising that a literary critic (not just any critic, but the editor of The Oxford Shakespeare) should write a book on castration. Be warned, however: this is not a conventional historical monograph but, rather, a personal rhapsody peppered with historical and literary references. "In order to answer the question 'What does it mean to …
Würdig einer liebevollen Pflege
In this comprehensive study of institutions for mental patients in nineteenth-century Württemberg, Angela Roth argues that the institutional psychiatry of the time was not characterized by a single, monolithic set of principles and practices. Despite some important continuities, the history of a psychiatric institution, she declares, is often the history of its directors and their often-different convictions. The director was supposed to be a maj…
The Modern Ovary
Contagion
Reviewed by: Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism Chandak Sengoopota David Farrell Krell. Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism. Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. x + 243 pp. $39.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paperbound). This unusual book explores how the Jena Romantics and idealists tackled “the conundrum that might be put this way: Nat…
Hitler
'The organic mendacity of woman'
Science and Homosexualities (review)
Reviewed by: Science and Homosexualities Chandak Sengoopta Vernon A. Rosario, ed. Science and Homosexualities. New York: Routledge, 1997. ix + 308 pp. Ill. $U.S. 65.00 (cloth), $18.95 (paperbound); $Can. 90.95 (cloth), $Can. 26.95 (paperbound). Historians have long been aware of the importance of the medicalization of homosexuality, and this anthology brings together some of the best and most recent work on the subject. Vernon Rosario’s introduct…
Glandular Politics
Focusing on the work of the physiologist Eugen Steinach and the clinician and activist Magnus Hirschfeld, this essay explores the complex interplay of experimental biology and medical discourse in the construction of a male homosexual identity in early twentieth-century Central Europe. Hirschfeld's collaboration with Steinach, the essay demonstrates, was not simply an instance of the imposition of a biomedical model of sexuality on the homosexual…
Reforming Sex
Reviewed by: Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 Chandak Sengoopta Atina Grossmann. Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. xvii + 304 pp. Ill. $45.00. Scholars working on the medicalization of sexuality have long been aware of the historical importance of the German discourse on the subject. Owing to complex reasons…
My Own Private Germany
Reviewed by: My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity Chandak Sengoopta Eric L. Santner. My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xiv + 200 pp. Ill. $22.95; £16.95. In 1911, Sigmund Freud published an essay entitled “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).” This was not a case r…
Psychiatrie im Widerstreit der Konzepte
Reviewed by: Psychiatrie im Widerstreit der Konzepte: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Tübinger Nervenklinik Chandak Sengoopta Ioannis Pilavas. Psychiatrie im Widerstreit der Konzepte: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Tübinger Nervenklinik. Contubernium, no. 39. Sigmaringen, Germany: Jan Thorbecke, 1994. 153 pp. DM 48.00; öS 380.00; Sw. Fr. 48.00. When the University of Tübingen opened its psychiatric clinic in November 1894, it was one of the last maj…
Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857-1940) (review)
Reviewed by: Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940) Chandak Sengoopta Magda Whitrow. Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940). London: Smith-Gordon, and Niigata-Shi, Japan: Nishimura, 1993. xxiv + 221 pp. £20.00 (paperbound). Clinical psychiatrists rarely win Nobel Prizes. Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940) was an exception. Contemporary of Sigmund Freud and successor to Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Wagner-Jauregg continues to be a prominent name in the history …
The Unknown Weininger
Otto Weininger (1880–1903) is a notorious figure in European history. 1 A Jewish intellectual of Vienna, Weininger committed suicide at the age of 23 after publishing a single book based on his doctoral dissertation, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character , 1903). The work was admired by some of the greatest intellects of our century—Franz Kafka, Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Joyce, Karl Kraus, August Strindberg. More recently, it has attained …
Science, Sexuality, and Gender in the FIN DE SIÈCLE
Glandular Politics
Focusing on the work of the physiologist Eugen Steinach and the clinician and activist Magnus Hirschfeld, this essay explores the complex interplay of experimental biology and medical discourse in the construction of a male homosexual identity in early twentieth-century Central Europe. Hirschfeld's collaboration with Steinach, the essay demonstrates, was not simply an instance of the imposition of a biomedical model of sexuality on the homosexual…
The Modern Ovary
The fruits of independence’
Challenging the longstanding consensus that Satyajit Ray's work is largely free of ideological concerns and notable only for its humanistic richness, this article shows with reference to representations of British colonialism and Indian nationhood that Ray's films and stories are marked deeply and consistently by a distinctively Bengali variety of liberalism. Drawn from an ongoing biographical project, it commences with an overview of the nationa…
The Unknown Weininger
Otto Weininger (1880–1903) is a notorious figure in European history. 1 A Jewish intellectual of Vienna, Weininger committed suicide at the age of 23 after publishing a single book based on his doctoral dissertation, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character , 1903). The work was admired by some of the greatest intellects of our century—Franz Kafka, Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Joyce, Karl Kraus, August Strindberg. More recently, it has attained …
Science, Sexuality, and Gender in the FIN DE SIÈCLE
Science, Sexuality, and Gender in the FIN DE SIÈCLE
Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857-1940) (review)
Reviewed by: Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940) Chandak Sengoopta Magda Whitrow. Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940). London: Smith-Gordon, and Niigata-Shi, Japan: Nishimura, 1993. xxiv + 221 pp. £20.00 (paperbound). Clinical psychiatrists rarely win Nobel Prizes. Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940) was an exception. Contemporary of Sigmund Freud and successor to Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Wagner-Jauregg continues to be a prominent name in the history …
The Unknown Weininger
Otto Weininger (1880–1903) is a notorious figure in European history. 1 A Jewish intellectual of Vienna, Weininger committed suicide at the age of 23 after publishing a single book based on his doctoral dissertation, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character , 1903). The work was admired by some of the greatest intellects of our century—Franz Kafka, Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Joyce, Karl Kraus, August Strindberg. More recently, it has attained …
Reforming Sex
Reviewed by: Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 Chandak Sengoopta Atina Grossmann. Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. xvii + 304 pp. Ill. $45.00. Scholars working on the medicalization of sexuality have long been aware of the historical importance of the German discourse on the subject. Owing to complex reasons…
My Own Private Germany
Reviewed by: My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity Chandak Sengoopta Eric L. Santner. My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xiv + 200 pp. Ill. $22.95; £16.95. In 1911, Sigmund Freud published an essay entitled “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).” This was not a case r…
Psychiatrie im Widerstreit der Konzepte
Reviewed by: Psychiatrie im Widerstreit der Konzepte: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Tübinger Nervenklinik Chandak Sengoopta Ioannis Pilavas. Psychiatrie im Widerstreit der Konzepte: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Tübinger Nervenklinik. Contubernium, no. 39. Sigmaringen, Germany: Jan Thorbecke, 1994. 153 pp. DM 48.00; öS 380.00; Sw. Fr. 48.00. When the University of Tübingen opened its psychiatric clinic in November 1894, it was one of the last maj…
'The organic mendacity of woman'
Science and Homosexualities (review)
Reviewed by: Science and Homosexualities Chandak Sengoopta Vernon A. Rosario, ed. Science and Homosexualities. New York: Routledge, 1997. ix + 308 pp. Ill. $U.S. 65.00 (cloth), $18.95 (paperbound); $Can. 90.95 (cloth), $Can. 26.95 (paperbound). Historians have long been aware of the importance of the medicalization of homosexuality, and this anthology brings together some of the best and most recent work on the subject. Vernon Rosario’s introduct…
Glandular Politics
Focusing on the work of the physiologist Eugen Steinach and the clinician and activist Magnus Hirschfeld, this essay explores the complex interplay of experimental biology and medical discourse in the construction of a male homosexual identity in early twentieth-century Central Europe. Hirschfeld's collaboration with Steinach, the essay demonstrates, was not simply an instance of the imposition of a biomedical model of sexuality on the homosexual…
Contagion
Reviewed by: Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism Chandak Sengoopota David Farrell Krell. Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism. Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. x + 243 pp. $39.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paperbound). This unusual book explores how the Jena Romantics and idealists tackled “the conundrum that might be put this way: Nat…
Hitler
The Modern Ovary
Würdig einer liebevollen Pflege
In this comprehensive study of institutions for mental patients in nineteenth-century Württemberg, Angela Roth argues that the institutional psychiatry of the time was not characterized by a single, monolithic set of principles and practices. Despite some important continuities, the history of a psychiatric institution, she declares, is often the history of its directors and their often-different convictions. The director was supposed to be a maj…
Otto Weininger
Book synopsis: Turn-of-the century Vienna is remembered as an aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual world: the birthplace of Freud and psychoanalysis, the waltz, and novels of Schnitzler. The contexts of this cultural vibrancy, Chandak Sengoopta argues, were darker and more complex than we might imagine. This provocative, enlightening study explores the milieu in which the philosopher Otto Weininger (1880-1903) wrote his controversial book Sex and …
One Hundred Years of Masochism
During the initial boom years of the history of sexuality, so much scholarly energy was devoted to the history of homosexuality that it often seemed that nineteenth-century sexology had constructed no other perversion. At long last, these other Others are beginning to emerge in the annals of scholarship. Masochism has had a good run recently, and the present volume of essays should raise its profile further
Castration
The construction of masculinity being so high on the research agendas of all kinds of scholars, it is scarcely surprising that a literary critic (not just any critic, but the editor of The Oxford Shakespeare) should write a book on castration. Be warned, however: this is not a conventional historical monograph but, rather, a personal rhapsody peppered with historical and literary references. "In order to answer the question 'What does it mean to …
A Passion for Diphthongs
I wish this piece could begin like Orhan Pamuk's novel The New Life: 'I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.This was the kind of light within which I could recast myself; I could lose my way in this light; I already sensed in the light the shadows of an existence I had yet to know and embrace'.My historic passion (such as it is) did not, alas, announce itself with any grandeur.I was pushed, to be sure, into 'an existence I had yet t…
Berlin Electropolis
Reviewed by: Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity Chandak Sengoopta Andreas Killen . Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity. Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, no. 38. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. viii + 295 pp. $49.95, £32.50 (0-520-24362-5). Around the middle of the nineteenth century, as telegraph cables began to girdle the planet and the potential utility of elec…
The Universal Film for all of us, everywhere in the world’
The fruits of independence’
Challenging the longstanding consensus that Satyajit Ray's work is largely free of ideological concerns and notable only for its humanistic richness, this article shows with reference to representations of British colonialism and Indian nationhood that Ray's films and stories are marked deeply and consistently by a distinctively Bengali variety of liberalism. Drawn from an ongoing biographical project, it commences with an overview of the nationa…
The Contours of Affinity
This paper seeks to demonstrate the complexities of the Tagorean legacy through a re-examination of Tagore's influence on the filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Reappraising Ray's brief period at Santiniketan and some of his most celebrated engagements with Tagore, the essay argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, Ray was not a wholehearted follower of Tagore but a critical and creative interlocutor. The nuanced interpretation of his relationship with …
Between Emulation and Innovation
Using the example of Upendrakishore Ray (1863–1915), a well-known Bengali artist, writer, technologist and publisher, this essay critiques prevalent theories that portray colonial Indian modernity as a largely derivative discourse. Addressing Ray’s globally recognised contributions to the refinement of technologies for the printing of photographs and paintings, the article shows how Ray’s relative lack of resources could not obstruct his innovati…
Global Forensic Cultures
Reviewed by: Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era ed. by Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin Chandak Sengoopta Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin, eds. Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. x + 346 pp. Ill. $64.95 (978-1421427492). This volume illustrates how handsomely historians are making up for their earlier neglect of forensic ideas, t…
Shinjini Das. Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India
The historiography of colonial science and medicine has expanded remarkably over the last few decades, with India, for understandable reasons, playing a stellar role in this literature. The long, complex history of British rule in the subcontinent offers a vast range of topics crying out for investigation by historians of science and medicine, and while many of these have been studied in great detail from different perspectives, a lot remains vir…
Through Agnostic Eyes
Examining the filmmaker Satyajit Ray's engagements with religious questions with reference to his films Devi (The Goddess), Mahapurush (The Holy Man), Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), Sadgati (Deliverance) and Ganashatru (A Public Enemy), this essay assesses the influence of Ray's Brahmo inheritance, his personal atheism/agnosticism and his cultural fascination with Hinduism in his representations of women's status and caste discrimination. It co…
History (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Art (13 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Psychoanalysis (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Art history (8 works) · Literature (8 works)