Erica Lynn Mukherjee is the Associate Area Head of Humanities and a Clinical Assistant Professor of History at NYU Shanghai. She is an environmental historian and studies mud and property in British India. Her current book project, The Impermanent Settlement: A History of the Actual Water and Soil of Imperial Bengal, uses a material culture lens to explore efforts by the British East India Company to bring physical and administrative stability to the watery landscapes of the Bengal Delta through efforts ranging from property ownership legislation to the construction of infrastructure such as embankments and railways.
Mukherjee has also been developing materially focused public environmental humanities projects including: Elemental Histories, walking tours of Manchester’s urban environment; Art in the Garden, botanically inspired creation workshops at the confluence of art and history; and Once Upon a Time, embodied storytelling practices for climate and the environment.
Select Publications
Mukherjee, Erica. “Imperial Ambition Left High and Dry: The Failure of the East India Company's Steam-Powered Dredging Vessel,” International Journal of Asian Studies (forthcoming 2026).
Mukherjee, Erica. “Why Study Failure? Lessons from the Life of Rowland MacDonald Stephenson,” in Early Railways, volume 7. eds. Stephen K. Jones and John Liffen, 269-287. Shildon, UK: Early Railways Conference Committee, 2022.
Mukherjee, Erica. “The Impermanent Settlement: Bengal’s Riparian Landscape, 1793-1846,” South Asian Studies 36:1 (2020), 20-31
- Mukherjee, Erica. “The Engineer in the Tropics: Building the East Indian Railway, 1844-1854,” in Early Mainline Railways, volume 2. ed. Michael Chrimes, 245-268. Croydon, UK: CPI Group, 2019.
Education
- PhD, History
Stony Brook University
- Environment
- South Asia
- Imperialism
- Public history
- Science and technology studies
- Transportation