Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire

HISTORY OF THE BOOK

SPEAKER: Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Yale

Priyasha Mukhopadhyah will be talking about her recent book, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire. In it, she explores how historical readers in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century 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.

About the Speaker

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. Her research interests span the 19th century literature, the history of the British empire, and the history of the book and reading. Her first book, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire, was published by Princeton University Press in August. She is also the coeditor of The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices (2017) and Acoustics of Empire: Sound, Media, and Power in the Long Nineteenth Century (2024).