dr. (Romit) R Chowdhury

Biography

Romit Chowdhury is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Erasmus University College. He primarily teaches courses in Urban Sociology, Gender Studies, and Qualitative Methods. These teaching areas relate directly to his research interests in Urban Studies, Masculinity Studies, Ethnography, and Literary Theory. 

His monograph - City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport - is an ethnography of the relationship between masculinities, co-presence, and urban mobilities. The project draws on the laboring lives of male public transport workers in Kolkata, and their interactions with commuters and traffic police, to show 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.

Supported by a grant from the Erasmus Trust Funds, Romit is beginning work on a new research project on urban multiculture in mixed-use spaces in Rotterdam. 

Between 2018-20, as a postdoctoral researcher in the Geography department 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, Mumbai, and Manila. 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 in Sociology at Uppsala University, in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and in Comparative Culture at Sophia University, Tokyo. He currently serves on the editorial boards of The Sociological Review, Men and Masculinities, and NORMA.