Arijit Banerjee is a first year PhD student in the program of Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies. He has obtained his BA in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University. He has also done three MAs in Performance Studies, History from Ambedkar University Delhi and Chinese Philosophy and Culture from Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Before joining the Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies program at Madison he submitted his MPhil dissertation titled Performing Histories in the Revolutionary Theatre of Utpal Dutt in the Department of Theatre Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Arijit has been interested in the Trans-national histories of Political Theatre histories in the Global South across India and China since 2019. He is particularly interested in the question of how theatre has performed histories and how theatre has been used as a mediation in Communist politics for generating critique and propaganda. He is also interested in Pan-Asianism of the early twentieth century philosophical thought in India and China. As an aspiring intellectual historian, he intends to draw from various interdisciplinary methods of History, Theatre Studies, Philosophy and Political theory to show how during the twentieth century Political Theatre concepts from various disciplines were at work for the purpose of creating a new aesthetics for the people.