In Required Reading, Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial 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.

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. She studies the literary history of the colonial world, primarily of South Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of her research 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. Mukhopadhyay's research 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.