Urdu’s Jane Austen: The World of A. R. Khatoon (1900–1965)

PERSIAN AND PERSIANATE STUDIES

SPEAKER: Francesca Orsini, Professor Emeritus, SOAS, London

Francesca Orsini is a literary historian specializing in Hindi and Urdu and Persian  with a longstanding interest in how multilingualism has shaped and continues to shape South Asian literary cultures. She completed her BA in Hindi at the University of Venice, studied at the Central Institute of Hindi and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, and earned her PhD at SOAS. Her early work examined the Hindi literary public sphere of the 1920s and 1930s, highlighting the contrast between the experimental vitality of journals—including women’s journals—and the canonization of “pure” and moral-patriotic Hindi in education (The Hindi Public Sphere, 2002; Hindi trans. 2010). She has also made significant contributions to the study of book history and print culture, notably in Print and Pleasure (2009), which explored commercial publishing in Hindi and Urdu in the nineteenth century and the proliferation of “oral-literate” genres across scripts amid emerging rigid language ideologies.

Co-sponsored by The South Asia Studies Colloquium and The Aga Khan Fund for Iranian Studies.