The winner of the JHI’s 2024 Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize for the best first book in intellectual history is Priyasha Mukhopadhyay for Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton University Press).
The judging committee offers this statement about the book:
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay’s Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire is a strikingly original contribution to intellectual history. This brilliant book gives paper and human interactions with paper their proper places at the center of the history of ideas. Focusing on South Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mukhopadhyay shows how the look, language, and feel of paper in all its many and varied forms—official paperwork, almanacs, handbooks, notebooks, poetry collections, petitions, newspapers, magazines, account books, and more—influence how ideas about everything from empire to social belonging develop and circulate. Exploring this material with the help of her sharp eye, we see how paper allowed the British Crown to make its power known and felt—and how subjects used paper to accommodate themselves to power, laugh at it, twist it, and ignore it. Unusually for a scholar of the written word, Mukhopadhyay is interested in people with limited literacy and time: in our own age of limited attention spans, her readings remind us of the importance of partially read or carelessly read texts. Her book is a model of how the history of ideas can be expanded to include the everyday, the ephemeral, and the marginal. This is a remarkable book, at once creative and meticulous, captivatingly written, accessible to field experts and amateurs alike. It is, in addition, a landmark study in the intellectual history of empire.
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University.
