Biography
Mishka Sinha took her undergraduate degree in English, History and Economics at St. Xavier's College, Bombay and an M. Phil in English Studies (Modern) at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. After a year's graduate work at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, in the USA, where she studied English and Comparative Literatures, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis, she undertook her PhD on the history of Sanskrit in Britain and the United States, at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 2013. From 2013-14, she was a Zukunftsphilologie Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Freie Universität, Berlin. Since October 2014, she has been a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of History, Cambridge.During her Max Weber Fellowship she will work on her current research project, ‘Ordering the Orient: A cultural and economic history of the publication of Eastern texts in the West, 1850-1939’, focussing especially on Oriental publishing in Europe, and the cultural and economic networks between Asia, Britain, Continental Europe and America which enabled the translation, dissemination and transformation of 'Eastern' ideas in the 'West'. The project argues for a new interpretation of Orientalism through an economic and cultural analysis of the production, publication and marketing of 'Oriental texts' in Europe and America. It examines the interrelationships between publishing practices and the scholarly and popular markets for Oriental texts, such as the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, the Daodejing and the Bhagavadgita, to understand how publishers and their markets mutually constructed and influenced one another.Her wider research interests include: the history of knowledge and cultural transmission especially from Asia to Europe, the cultural and intellectual histories of Europe, the United States and Asia in the contexts of Orientalism and colonialism, and the histories of philology, scholarship, disciplinary formations, universities, texts and knowledge production; literary modernism; and the contemporary history of Indian art, a field in which she has worked as an actor-performer since 2003. At Cambridge Mishka supervised (one-on-one classes) 3rd year undergraduates in history on modern South Asia, and lectured at the History Faculty on ‘European Perceptions of the East, c.1770-1900’, ‘Anticolonial Texts: Al-Afghani, Bolivar, Lenin, Gandhi, Tagore, Nasser’ and ‘Knowledge, Power and Scholarship in South Asia, 1770s-1900’ for paper topics on South Asia, and Empires and World History in the modern period. She has also taught undergraduate as well as post-graduate seminars on Historical Argument and Practice and Seminal Books in World History. She has lectured and taught seminars on Colonial Knowledge at the University of London. She is keen to contribute to undergraduate and especially postgraduate teaching in any field or topic related to her research interests and teaching experience.