NEW HAVEN, Conn. (Diya TV) — Indian-origin scholar Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, an assistant professor of English at Yale University, has won the 2025 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize for her groundbreaking work on colonial South Asia.
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale announced the award on Sept. 2. The prize recognizes Mukhopadhyay’s book, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire.
The Gaddis Smith Prize is one of Yale’s most prestigious honors for faculty authors. Established in 2004, the prize celebrates excellence in writing on global history and empire. Winners receive a research appointment at the MacMillan Center along with $5,000 in funding to support future scholarship.
Mukhopadhyay joins a distinguished list of faculty honored for advancing Yale’s tradition of global research and teaching. In her book, Mukhopadhyay examines how ordinary printed materials shaped life under British colonial rule in South Asia. She studies manuals, government documents, and almanacs, showing how these texts influenced readers’ political awareness and daily choices.
The prize committee praised her work as “deeply researched, deft in its style, innovative in its analysis, and a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.” Mukhopadhyay argues that reading in the colonial era was not limited to elite circles. Instead, she shows how “even partial, resisted, or utilitarian reading practices became central to the ways individuals navigated and responded to imperial rule.”
Her research highlights the political and imaginative power of reading, even when the act was simple or practical. This is the second major award for Mukhopadhyay’s book in recent months. In June, the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences presented her with the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize, which honors outstanding humanities scholarship.
The back-to-back recognitions underscore the book’s impact in reshaping how scholars and readers view the British Empire and its cultural legacies. Mukhopadhyay completed her PhD in English at the University of Oxford. Before that, she earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and MPhil degrees from the University of Delhi.
The MacMillan Center’s International Book Prizes spotlight influential works on international and area studies. Each year, the center selects winners whose research expands understanding of global history, culture, and politics.
Alongside Mukhopadhyay, the 2025 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize went to Professor Paul Benton for his study of global history. Last year’s recipients included Stephanie Newell for research on West African literature and Egor Lazarev for a study on law and state-building in Chechnya.
