Dr Pragya Dhital
Lecturer in Collections, Archives, and the Study of the Book
Pragya Dhital is a Lecturer in Collections, Archives and the Study of the Book. She joined the IES from the UK National Archives, where she was Records Specialist for Empire and Commonwealth, and UCL, where she taught in the Sarah Parker Remond Centre. She has also worked as a Hindi and Urdu cataloguer in the British Library and taught in the Politics and Anthropology departments at SOAS for several years. Her first book project, The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic in 2025. Her second book project concerns a collection of publications proscribed in colonial India, now jointly held by the British Library and the National Archives of India.
She has disseminated her research through a number of public engagement activities in collaboration with a wide range of galleries, archives, libraries and museums: public workshops at UCL (2018 and 2022), an open-access special section of History Workshop Journal (2020), an exhibition at SOAS art gallery (Crafting Subversion, spring-summer 2022), as well as through blogs, podcasts, talks, events and film screenings.