Dr Somdatta Bhattacharya has a PhD in English Studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. In the past, she has also taught at institutions such as the University of Hyderabad and BITS Pilani, India. Her research interests are rooted in areas of urban cultures, crime fiction, social theories of space and spatiality, crime and city in literature, Indian writing in English, gender and South Asian popular culture, and she has taught, published, presented and supervised extensively in these areas. She has also been an investigator in multiple government and privately funded projects on the Indian urban underclass and their usage of urban space.