Anushka Kulkarni

Anushka Kulkarni is a PhD candidate in musicology at UC Davis.  She holds a bachelor’s degree in music in vocal performance and music history from the University of Delaware.  Her primary research interests are in 18th-century opera, Rabindra Sangeet, and postcolonial studies. Her dissertation, “The Empire Sings Back: Operatic Histories of British-Indian Colonial Encounter”, engages in a transnational study of both European opera and Bengali musical drama, and their intersections with the empire.  Anushka’s research has been supported by the UC Davis Dean’s Graduate Summer Fellowship.  In 2023, she was the recipient of a Critical Language Scholarship. 

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Anushka is conducting archival work at the National Library, the West Bengal State Archives, and Asiatic Society, all situated in Kolkata, as well as at the Rabindra Bhavan Library and Archives in Santiniketan.  This archival research will contribute to her dissertation on opera and British-Indian colonial encounter in 19th- and 20th-century Calcutta.  Her work is also examining the complex and often contradictory representations of coloniality in musical drama.  Besides, she is accessing primary source material on the presence and reception of Italian opera in 19th-century Calcutta as well as on the musical drama, or gitinatya, of the Bengali polymath, Rabindranath Tagore.