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Research and Publications

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Articles/chapters

  • Prasad, R. “Practicing Censorship? Paper, Print, and Democracy in India,” Journal of Social History, Volume 58, Issue 2 (Winter 2024): 313–338.
  • Prasad, R. “Railway bookselling and the politics of print in India: The case of A. H. Wheeler.” Book History, 24: 1 (Spring 2021): 115-145.
  • Prasad, R. “Press freedom and colonial governance in India, 1780-1823,” Modern Asian Studies (Modern Asian Studies , Volume 55, Issue 2 (March 2021): 335 – 370
  • Prasad, R. “National Necessity’ and ‘Patriotic Duty’: Railway Publicity in World War II India.” In M. Crowley & S. Dawson (Eds.), Home Fronts – Britain and the Empire at War, 1939–45 (Boydell & Brewer, 2017)
  • Prasad, Ritika. “Railways in Colonial South Asia,” Mobility in History, 6:1 (Fall 2014)
  • Prasad, Ritika. “Women, Railways and Respectability in Colonial India,” in Jason Coy, Ben Marschke, Jared Poley, and Claudia Verhoeven, eds, Kinship Community, and Self: Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean (Berghahn Books, 2014)
  • Prasad, Ritika “‘Time-Sense”: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India.” Modern Asian Studies, volume 47: 4, July 2013: 1252-82 (Also  available on MAS first-view, November 2012)
  • Prasad, Ritika, “Smoke and Mirrors: Women and Railway Travel in Colonial South Asia.” South Asian History and Culture, 3:1, January 2012: 26-46.

Public Writing

Overcrowded trains serve as metaphor for India in Western eyes – but they are a relic of colonialism and capitalism, The Conversation, 8 June 2023

Research Interests:

  • South Asian history; colonial and imperial history, nationalism and decolonization;
  • Subaltern history; postcolonial theory; Alltagsgeschichte
  • Social history, history of technology; technology and society
  • Railway history
  • Print culture

Current Research

My current book project Imprimatur, Mediator, and Adversary: Press, Public and State in India, 1780-2023 examines the long-term triangular relationship between newspaper press, the colonial and postcolonial state, and a broader public as it has developed in India over two centuries. Instead of structuring state–press relations through the dichotomies of power versus freedom and/or surveillance versus sedition, it imagines it as one in which newspapers served simultaneously as imprimaturs, mediators, and adversaries in relation to the state. 

Courses Taught

  • HIST 6693: Graduate Historiography and Methodology
  • Hist 4797: Honors Methods and Practice: “History from Below”
  • History 4600: Fiction in History
  • Hist 4600: Islam in South Asia
  • Hist 4600: Imperialism and National Resistance
  • Hist 4002-5001: From Colony to Nation: Empire and Decolonization in South Asia
  • Hist 3168: Mohandas Gandhi and and Dissent in the Modern World
  • HIST 3002: British Imperialism in India: Empire, Nation,  & the Making of Modern South Asia
  • Hist 2600 (2100): Literary Cultures in Britain and India in an Age of Empire
  • LBST: 2102-202: Religion and Society in South Asia
  • LBST: 2102-202:Imperial “Encounters”: Colonialism and Nationalism in the Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries

Education
Ph.D., History (South Asia): University of California, Los Angeles, 2009
M.A., Modern History: Magdalen College, University of Oxford, 2001
B.A., History: St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, 1997