Professor Tithi Bhattacharya receives AHA’s 2025 John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History

Department of History Professor Tithi Bhattacharya has been selected by the American Historical Association (AHA) to receive the 2025 John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History for her recent book, Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke Univ. Press, 2024). The prize was announced in an October 15 AHA news release.

The John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History recognizes the most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asian history published in English. South Asia is defined as the geographic area included in the modern states of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Eligibility will be defined quite broadly, including books on any period or field of South Asian historical studies and works which integrate South Asian history with broader global issues and movements.

Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of South Asian History at Purdue University, having joined the Department of History in 2002. She received her PhD in History from the University of London in 2000. 

In addition to Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence, Professor Bhattacharya is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005) and is the editor of the now classic study, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017). Her coauthored book includes the popular Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019) which has been translated in over 30 languages. She writes extensively on South Asian history, Marxist theory, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia Research, The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation, and the New Left Review. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Gender Studies, Studies on Asia and Spectre.

Dr. Bhattacharya teaches courses in South Asian history, Transnational Gender, Colonialism and Global History. Learn more about Dr. Tithi Bhattacharya at this link.

Read the announcement from the American Historical Association at this link: https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/american-historical-association-announces-2025-prize-winners/