Meet the Chair of CEET
Sunayani Bhattacharya, Ph.D.
The Chair of the Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching (CEET) works with the Vice Provost for Institutional and Educational Effectiveness to lead campus-wide initiatives to cultivate a community among faculty and a culture of continuous improvement in teaching, pedagogy, and course design. The Chair provides strategic leadership for CEET and identifies opportunities for improvement and innovation in teaching and learning, such as administering faculty learning communities; facilitating course development and pedagogical enhancement workshops; leading a faculty mentoring program for teaching and pedagogy; seeking external partnerships, funding, and grant opportunities related to pedagogy and curriculum design; partnering with EdTech for integration of technology in effective teaching; and coordinate data-informed programming strategies in partnership with various campus offices.
Sunayani Bhattacharya has been serving as Chair of CEET since 2023. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of English. In her role as Chair, Dr. Bhattacharya has launched Faculty Learning Communities, and is currently spearheading the Peer Teaching Feedback initiative. Dr. Bhattacharya has also served on several campus-wide communities, including Core Curriculum Committee, Institutional Review Board, and the Committee on Faculty Development and Scholarship.
Dr. Bhattacharya’s scholarship is at the juncture of comparative literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Archival Studies, and she investigates practices of reading and listening as they emerge in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Bhattacharya completed her doctoral work in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. She is the co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Nineteenth Century Studies. Her first book, The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal: Becoming Readers in Colonial India (Bloomsbury, 2023) studies the ways in which Bengalis thought about reading; how they approached the thorny question of influence; and uncovers that they relied on classical Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic literary and aesthetic models, whose attendant traditions formed not a distant past, but coexisted, albeit contentiously, with the everyday present.