Faculty at School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Aakriti Mandhwani

Aakriti Mandhwani

Associate Professor

School of Humanities and Social Sciences


Contact Information

Book and Magazine History, Cultural Studies, Popular Literature, South Asian and Hindi Literature and Literary History, and History of Libraries in South Asia.

2018, Ph.D., SOAS, University of London

2012, M.Phil. (English), University of Delhi

2010, M.A. (English), University of Delhi

2007, B.Com. (Hons), University of Delhi

06/17—07/17, Course Convener and Tutor, History of the Book in India, London School of Rare Books, Institute of Advanced Studies, London

01/14—08/14, Assistant Professor, Ramjas College, University of Delhi, Delhi

07/13—12/13, Assistant Professor, Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, Delhi

07/11—07/13, Assistant Professor, I.P. College for Women, University of Delhi, Delhi

2018, Project Fellow, "The History of Journalism in 'Belt and Road' Countries", School of International Journalism and Communication, Beijing Foreign Studies University

2014-2017, Felix Scholarship for a Ph.D. at SOAS

2013-2015, Project Fellow, "Hinglish: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Hindi-English Bilingualism in Contemporary India" held in collaboration with British Academy International, SOAS and Sarai, CSDS

1. Aakriti Mandhwani. "The Hindi Library and the Making of an Archive: The Hindi Sahitya Sammelan from 1911 to 1973", South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 3 (June 2020): 522-536.

2. Aakriti Mandhwani. "Sarit and the 1950s Hindi middlebrow reader", Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 53, no. 6 (2019): 1797-1815.

Book Chapters:

1. Aakriti Mandhwani. "Hindi hain hum?: Publishing in Hinglish. Hinglish Live: Language mixing across media". Edited by Francesca Orsini and Ravikant. Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2022. ISBN: 9789354420283.

2. Aakriti Mandhwani. "From the Colloquial to the 'Literary': Hindi Pulp's Journey from the Streets to the Bookshelves", Indian Genre Fiction: Past and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity. Delhi: Routledge, 2018. ISBN: 9780367479138.

Books:

1. Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity. Delhi: Routledge, 2018. ISBN: 9780367479138.

INVITED LECTURES

  • 28 Jan 2022: "The Case of Exploding Hindi Paperbacks", IIT Bhilai.
  • 20 Jan 2022: "Hindi Modernisms and the Short Story: A Brief History", Krea University.
  • 4 Oct 2021: Delivered a lecture at Ashoka University English Department's MA proseminar.
  • 8 Jan 2021: Delivered a lecture at the "Archives and Afterlives: Literary Studies Now." series at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi.
  • 9 Oct 2020: "Hindi Modernism in Commercial Middlebrow Magazines of the 1950s", at Department of Comparative Indian Language and Literature, University of Calcutta.
  • 5 Nov 2020: Delivered a lecture at the National Institute of Design, Haryana.
  • 10-17 Nov 2018: Gave lectures as Project Fellow as part of "The History of Journalism in "Belt and Road Countries", School of International Journalism and Communication, Beijing Foreign Studies University.

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

  • 30 July 2021: Presentation at the panel titled "Vernacular Literary Magazines and the Shaping of Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia" at European Conference on South Asian Studies, Vienna.
  • 23-24 May 2019: "Reading the Hindi Bestseller List" at "Millennium's Children", University of Naples L'Orientale, Italy.
  • 11 Oct 2018: "Middlebrow cosmopolitanisms: Dharmyug in the 1950s and 60s", at the colloquium titled "The Politics and Poetics of South Asian Modernism", Center for South Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison.