Priyasha Mukhopadhyay in Conversation - Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire

In Required Reading, Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read.

PANELISTS

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. She studies the literary history of the colonial world, primarily of South Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of her research explores practices of reading in this period, focusing on situations that challenge our notions of what it means to read and who is a reader. Mukhopadhyay's research has appeared in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Victorian Culture, and the edited volume, Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World. She is also a co-editor of The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices, a collection of essays that seeks to explore some of the ways in which books travel across national and linguistic borders.

Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (Columbia, 1989; 25th anniversary edition, Columbia, 2014) and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998), which won, among other prizes, the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize and the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. She is coeditor of the book series South Asia Across the Disciplines, originally published jointly by the university presses of Columbia, Chicago, and California under a Mellon grant. Her current research is on Aldous Huxley and pacifism. She is presently Stanley Kelley, Jr., Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. Viswanathan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.

A professor in the English Dept and in the Prison Ed Program at NYU, Elaine Freedgood is the author of Victorian writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel, and Worlds Enough: the Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel.