NEW HAVEN, CT (TIP): Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, an Indian American Assistant Professor of English at Yale University, has been awarded a 2025 International Book Prize by its Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.
Among Yale’s most prestigious honors for scholarly publishing, the prizes highlight the MacMillan Center’s role in advancing research that examines the forces shaping our world, according to a media release.
Established in 2004 to honor two former directors of the MacMillan Center, the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize celebrates the most outstanding book by a Yale ladder faculty member, and the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize honors the best first book by a Yale ladder faculty member. Recipients receive a research appointment at the MacMillan Center along with $5,000 in funding to support their continued scholarship.
Mukhopadhyay, received the 2025 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize for her book “Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire”(Princeton University Press, 2024).
In Required Reading, Mukhopadhyay offers a fresh perspective on the history of reading by examining how everyday texts such as manuals, government documents, and almanacs shaped the imaginative and political lives of readers in colonial South Asia.
Through compelling case studies, she shows how even partial, resisted, or utilitarian reading practices became central to the ways individuals navigated and responded to imperial rule.
The prize committee praised the book as “deeply researched, deft in its style, innovative in its analysis, and a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.”
Lauren Benton, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History and Professor of Law, received the 2025 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize for “They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence ” (Princeton University Press, 2024).
Last year marked the 20th anniversary of the International Book Prizes.
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