dr. R (Romit) Chowdhury

Biography

Romit Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Erasmus University College and the Department of Public Administration and Sociology. He teaches courses in Urban Sociology, Gender Studies, and Qualitative Methods. These teaching areas speak to his research interests in Urban Studies, Masculinities, Everyday Life, Ethnography, and Literary Theory. 

His monograph - City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport (Rutgers '23) - is an ethnography of the laboring lives of male public transport workers in Kolkata, and their interactions with commuters and traffic police. It shows how everyday morality and cooperation on public transport reproduce male privilege in the city. A section from this book jointly received the award for the best article published in the journal Urban Studies in 2021.

Currently, Romit is working on two projects. The first, supported by a grant from the Erasmus Trust Funds, is a study of the social aesthetics of urban multiculture in mixed-use spaces in Rotterdam. The second, funded by an NWO Open Competition XS grant, is a literary ethnography of how social polarization is bridged by everyday social practices in the city.  

Between 2018-20, as a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University in the UK, Romit worked on a comparative project on densities in Asian cities. The emphasis of his work was on the social life of crowds in busy transport hubs in Tokyo. His earlier research has explored masculinities in the contexts of men's rights movements, feminist methodology, sexual violence, care-giving, and men doing feminist research and activism in India.

Romit has an interdisciplinary training in literature, cultural studies, and the social sciences. He received his PhD in Sociology from the National University of Singapore.

He has been a visiting researcher at Uppsala University, University of Amsterdam, Karlstad University, Sophia University, and University of Lausanne. He currently serves on the editorial boards of The Sociological Review, Men and Masculinities, and NORMA.