Rate My Professor Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

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.