She specializes in Modern South Asian History. Her first book, The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal, was published by Oxford University Press in 2005. The book looks at the co-constitutive relationship between processes of class formation and nation formation. Dr. Bhattacharya is currently working on two book projects. She is editing a volume of essays on gender and labor, under contract with Pluto Press. She is also writing a history of fear in colonial Bengal. Uncanny Histories maps the role Bengali ghosts and ghost stories have played in reconstituting “traditional” Indian religious thought and in bringing such thought into a new relationship with the science and religion of a colonizing Europe.