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

Please join the South Asian Studies Council for a conversation with Professor Priyasha Mukhopadhyay on her latest book, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire.

Copies of the book will be for sale by Atticus Bookstore Cafe at the event.

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.