[Reader-list] Talk by Francesca Orsini

[Ravikant]

You are cordially invited to Sarai-CSDS on 25th July, Wednesday, 4.00 PM for a 
talk on

 Print and Pleasure 

by Dr. Francesca Orsini


Abstract:

How do we explain the boom in commercial publishing in 19th Century north 
India, given the very low rates of literacy? How did commercial publishers 
win over to the printed page a society which was used to entertainment 
through oral, visual, and embodied performances. This talk seeks to answer 
these questions while surveying a range of successful genres in Hindi and 
Urdu.

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Introduction:

Francesca Orsini is Lecturer in Hindi. She took her undergraduate degree in 
Hindi at the University of Venice, followed by a long spell in Delhi. Her PhD 
research at SOAS was on the Hindi Public Sphere of the 1920s and '30s, 
subsequently published under the same title, from OUP. She taught at the 
University of Cambridge for 11 years and has just joined SOAS. 

Dr Orsini's main area of research is modern Hindi literature, where she has 
published on Hindi literary life during the nationalist period; commercial 
genres such as detective fiction and "social romances"; women writers and 
women's journals; nineteenth-century commercial publishing in Hindi and Urdu. 
She has organized several workshops and conferences, including one on Love in 
South Asia.

Her recent books include Print and Pleasure: the genres of commercial 
publishing in nineteenth-century north India and the edited collection Hindi 
and Urdu Before the Divide (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007).