“Reading for Time” with Priyasha Mukhopadhyay
Save the Date: December 12, 2025
For our final digital event of the 2025 season, we are thrilled to host Priyasha Mukhopadhyay (Yale University), who will be talking about her recent award-winning book, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton UP 2024). Part of our ongoing Speakers’ Forum series, Priyasha’s talk, “Reading for Time,” will take place on Friday, December 12 at the usual time: 8 a.m. ET / 11 a.m. ET / 4 p.m. UK / 5 p.m. CET.
Reading Everyday Texts in the British Empire
Required Reading 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, Priyasha argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read.
This lecture draws from Chapter 3 of the book, which explores the history of panjikas, astrological almanacs published in Bengal.
The book has won several awards, including the Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal for the History of Ideas, the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize from the Macmillan Center at Yale, and the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize (Yale). It received an Honorable Mention from the SHARP Book History Book Prize and was shortlisted Shortlisted for the Stansky Book Prize by the North American Conference on British Studies.
About Our Speaker
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. Her research focuses on the literary history of the colonial world, primarily of South Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and 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.
Her work 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. She is currently at work on a second project focused on the multimedia history of the lecture at the turn of the twentieth century.
