1.

Atig Ghosh is a Memeber , Calcutta Research Group, and Assistant Professor, Department of History, Visva-Bharati University. His recent research focuses on migration, statelessness, border towns and development under neoliberalism.

2.

Iman Mitra is presently a Research and Programme Associate at Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group. He has registered with Jadavpur University as an ICSSR Doctoral Fellow for his PhD in 2009 and submitted his thesis for examination in 2013. His PhD dissertation explores the history of dissemination of economic knowledge in colonial Bengal through various pedagogical and institutional networks. His research interests include modes of popularization of the discipline of economics in colonial and post-colonial India and the appropriation of and negotiations with disciplinary knowledge at the level of practical application. At MCRG, He is involved in a project on the interconnectedness between rural to urban migration, urbanization,and social justice in post-liberalization India. He has also contributed in many Bengali and English dailies on issues of political and social import.

Kaustubh Mani Sengupta studied history at Presidency College, Kolkata and at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His PhD, titled “Planned Spaces, Intimate Places: Ordering a City and Creating a Neighbourhood in Colonial Calcutta” studied the process of urbanization of Calcutta from the middle of the eighteenth century up to the initial decades of the twentieth, looking at various spaces of colonial Calcutta and trying to map the ways in which the city was imagined, perceived and shaped. He is currently engaged in a research project studying the role of education and vocational training in shaping the lives of the inmates of the refugee settlements in post-colonial India. His main fields of interests are colonial history with a focus on South Asia, the history of modern Bengal, spatial approaches in history (particularly focusing on urban history), partition and decolonization.

Mithilesh Kumar is a PhD Candidate at Western Sydney University, Australia. His dissertation tries to understand the evolution of new forms of governance, sovereignty and labour processes and politics in the context of infrastructure. He studied Delhi airport for his thesis. He has earlier worked on logistics of migration, disaster management and governance in Bihar. His interest is in the issues of logistics, migration and labour and politics. He is now currently working on the dialogic relationship between the nature, evolution and innovation of the Indian state with social and political movements in India. He is the author of "Governing Flood, Migration and Conflict in North Bihar." Government of Peace Social Governance, Security and the Problematic of Peace. Ed. Ranabir Samaddar. London: Ashgate, 2015 and “Statistics , Public-Private Partnership and the Emergence of a New Subject.” Accumulation in Postcolonial Capitalism, Ed. Ranabir Samaddar, Samita Sen, and Iman Kumar Mitra, Singapore: Springer, Forthcoming.

Paula Banerjee, the Honorary Director  of CRG, is an expert on Indo-American relations and studied in Cincinnati, Ohio. As part of her current work on borders and women, she has authored numerous papers on women in conflict situations in northeast India.  She is a full time faculty member in the Department of South and South East Asian Studies, University of Calcutta. She has authored a book on Indo-US relations, titled When Ambitions Clash (2003), and has co-authored a book, Women in Society and Politics in France. Dr. Banerjee is the recipient of a number of international fellowships including the Advanced Taft Fellowship (1991-1993) and has been the recipient of the WISCOMP Fellow Of Peace Award (2001).  Currently she is working on women in peace movements in South Asia and on borders and boundaries in the region. She is now the editorial board member of the Refugee Watch.

Ranabir Samaddar is the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies of the Calcutta Research Group, and belongs to the school of critical thinking. He has pioneered along with others peace studies programmes in South Asia. He has worked extensively on issues of justice and rights in the context of conflicts in South Asia. The much-acclaimed The Politics of Dialogue (Ashgate, 2004) was the culmination of his work on justice, rights, and peace. His particular researches have been on migration and refugee studies, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control. He authored a three-volume study of Indian nationalism, (Whose Asia Is It Anyway – nation and The Region in South Asia, 1996, The Marginal Nation – Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal, 1999, and A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947-1997, 2001). His recent political writings published in the form of a 2 volume account, The Materiality of Politics (Anthem Press, 2007), and the just published The Emergence of the Political Subject (Sage, 2009) have challenged some of the prevailing accounts of the birth of nationalism and the nation state, and have signalled a new turn in critical post-colonial thinking.

Samata Biswas teaches English at Haldia Govt. College. She has recently completed her Ph D from the Dept. of Cultural Studies, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad on body cultures in contemporary India. Her areas of interest include gender, visual culture and the body. As part of the ongoing project she is enquiring into the making of Haldia as a logistical space, dependent on, yet not overdetermined by the port. 

Subir Bhaumik, former BBC's bureau chief (East-Northeast India) , is now senior editor with Dhaka-based bdnews24.com and consultant editor with Myanmar’s Mizzima News.  He has worked for Reuters and Time magazine, Press Trust of India and Ananda Bazar group. He has been a Queen Elizabeth House fellow at Oxford University(1989-90) , a fellow at East-West Center , Washington ( 2004) and Eurasian-Nets fellow at Frankfurt University (2009). He is the author of Insurgent Crossfire: Northeast India and Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India’s Northeast and has edited Living on the Edge and Counter-Gaze: Media,Migrants, Minorities.  He writes regular columns on regional issues and defence and security for leading Indian dailies like Telegraph, Times of India, the Hindu and Economic Times and does special features for BBC and Al Jazeera Online. He is closely associated with the Track 2  Kolkata-Kunming (K2K) process involving Indian and Chinese border states  and is a member of the Calcutta Research Group.