Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University in the Literature faculty, where she has held a tenure-track position since July 2018. Prior to Yale, she served as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2016 to 2018 and as an ad-hoc Lecturer in English at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, from 2010 to 2012. She earned her DPhil in English from the University of Oxford in 2016, supported by the Ahmet and Mica Ertegun Scholarship in the Humanities, with a dissertation titled "Unlikely Readers: Negotiating the Book in Colonial South Asia, c. 1857–1914." Mukhopadhyay also holds an MPhil in English from the University of Delhi (2012, first class with distinction), an MA in English (2010, first class, ranked first in the university), and a BA (Hons) in English (2008, first class, ranked second).

Her scholarship centers on the literary history of the colonial world, primarily South Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a focus on reading practices among non-formally trained readers and the role of everyday texts such as petitions, almanacs, railway timetables, directories, and instruction manuals in shaping colonial subjectivities. Mukhopadhyay's first monograph, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 2024), received the Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies from the Modern Language Association, and an honorable mention for the 2025 SHARP Book Prize. She was awarded the 2024-25 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for outstanding early-career faculty at Yale. She co-edited The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and has published articles including “Listening Like a Theosophist” (Political Theology, 2018), “On Not Reading The Soldier’s Pocket-book for Field Service” (Journal of Victorian Culture, 2017), and “Of Greasy Notebooks and Dirty Newspapers” (The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2015). Her work has been presented in invited talks at Beinecke Library, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Professional Email: priyasha.mukhopadhyay@yale.edu