Somak Mukherjee is currently a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English at UCSB. He received his undergraduate and a graduate degree in English literature from Jadavpur University, in Kolkata, India. After working in the same institution as a research fellow for three years he left for Italy in 2016 to hold an Erasmus Research Fellowship at the University of Bologna. In the Fall of 2017, he joined UCSB, and since then his research focus here has been on postcolonial literary studies, environmental media studies, global modernisms, visual culture, and urban studies. Previously, he has been the Research Assistant at the Hemispheric South(s) Research Initiative Center in the Department of English (2018-2019), at the Center for Literature and Environment (2019-2020), and at the Center of Modern Culture, Materialism, and Aesthetics (COMMA) in 2020-2021. Somak is currently a UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) Public Humanities Fellow, joining the program in 2020, and is also holding the IHC Dissertation Research Fellowship for Fall 2021. At UCSB he has received the Graduate Division Research Accelerator Award (2020) and the Dean’s Prize for Teaching Fellowship (2021-22). His public writings have appeared in leading Indian print and digital platforms, such as Scroll, The Citizen, Huffington Post (India), Humanities Underground, and Anandabazar Patrika. 

He joined the Global Latinidades Project as a Research Assistant in Summer 2020, and initially worked as a Grant Writer and Editorial Assistant for various projects in the process of applications or book projects in the production stage. Since Fall 2020, he has served as the research and editorial assistant for an anthology titled In the Long Run: Luis J. Rodríguez’s Life and Literary Legacy —Essays, Interviews, and Reflections, with Selected New Writings by the Author. This book project focused on the life and literary legacy of writer and activist, Louis J Rodriguez, is edited by Ben Olguin (UCSB) and Josephine Metcalf (University of Hull), and to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022-2023. As part of this project, Mukherjee is the co-convenor of a virtual workshop involving the contributors of the anthology, in Spring 2021 at UC Santa Barbara, for which Professor Olguin and Professor Metcalf were the joint convenors.