Education
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
A.B., Asian Studies and Chinese, Vassar College
Research Interests
Hindi/Urdu literary cultures, Chinese literature (Republican and Socialist periods), modernism, theories and intellectual histories of comparison, world literature, translation, contemporary art, postcolonial studies, Global South studies
Background
Adhira Mangalagiri is a comparatist who works on Hindi/Urdu and Chinese literatures of the twentieth century. She studies literary comparison both in terms of contact (the overlapping paths of texts, people, and objects across the national borders), and in terms of contingency (comparative paradigms that bring texts together in the absence of material contact). She is centrally interested in questions of literary method – as explored in the fields of critical theory, postcolonial theory, and world-literary theory – and particularly in the history/literature and aesthetics/politics dyads. She also works on theorizing the practice and value of literary comparison beyond Eurocentric paradigms, and of literature in a rapidly shifting mediascape.
Mangalagiri is a member of the British Academy-funded project on Chinese Global Orders. Since 2017, she has served on the editorial team of Comparative Critical Studies, the house journal for the British Comparative Literature Association, and is currently a General Editor of the journal. Prior to joining NYU in 2024, she was Senior Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London.
Research
Mangalagiri is the author of States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2023), which won the Anna Balakian Prize awarded by the International Comparative Literature Association. States of Disconnect studies the breakdown of transnationalism in Chinese and Hindi texts (1900-1965) that express an aversion to pairing ideas of China and India together. Such texts may seem to spell the ends of comparative thought, but States of Disconnect shows how literary practice can offer possibilities of relation in the face of insular nationalisms. The book offers “disconnect” as a critical lens for making sense of severed, interrupted, or absent transnational connection, and for finding in such moments an ethics of relation.
Mangalagiri’s book-in-progress is Stealth Translation. The book studies translation conducted in the shadows, in gestures of guile and guise, obscurity and concealment. At a time when exposure and visibility can imperil life and livelihood, the book considers how inhabiting the shadows, the threshold between visibility and invisibility, may afford a politically effective realm from which to upset hegemonic bordering regimes. The book plots an eclectic lineage of interlingual tricks, hidden identities, and secret codes captured in Chinese and Indian texts as offering translational pathways for eluding exclusionary forces of regulation and control.
Selected Publications
Book
States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2023). Winner of the 2025 Balakian Prize awarded by the International Comparative Literature Association.
Edited Special Issues
Co-edited with Eesha Kumar, “South Asian Untranslatables,” Philological Encounters 10.4 (2025).
Co-edited with Jacob Blakesley, Rosa Mucignat, and Elisa Segnini, “How We Compare,” Comparative Critical Studies 20.2-3 (2023).
“China and India across Disciplines,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Asian Interactions 21. 1-2 (2023).
Co-edited with Tansen Sen, “Methods in China-India Studies,” International Journal of Asian Studies 19. 2 (2022).
Articles
“The Time-Traveling Translator, Or, The Turn to Time in World Literature Studies,” Comparative Literature 78.1 (2026): 1-19.
“重思泰戈尔翻译的‘忠实性’问题” (Rethinking the Question of “Faithfulness” in Tagore’s Translations), trans. Lin Juntao,《跨文化对话》Dialogue Transculturel 52 (2025): 235-251.
“Comp Lit’s Other Half: In Defense of Literature, with Lao She,” Comparative Critical Studies 20.2-3 (2023): 347-379.
“The Culture of Cultural Diplomacy: China and India, 1948-1952,” China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies 3.2 (2021): 202-216.
“A Poetics of the Writers’ Conference: Literary Relation in the Cold War World,” Comparative Literature Studies 58. 3 (2021): 509-531.
“A Donkey’s Wisdom: Can Literature Help Us Respond to the China-India Border Clash?,” Economic & Political Weekly 55.34 (2020): 17-19.
“Ellipses of Cultural Diplomacy: The 1957 Chinese Literary Sphere in Hindi,” Journal of World Literature 4.4 (2019): 508-529.
“The World Within: Worlding Theory and Language of Method in World Literature,” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 60 (2017): 299-313.
Book chapters
“Comparison and the Search for Unmediated Encounter,” The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature, edited by Laura Brueck and Praseeda Gopinath, 170-187. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2024.
“Solidarity’s Temporalities.” The Routledge Companion to Global South Literatures, edited by Alfred Lopez and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, 19-30. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2023.
“Slave of the Colonizer: The Indian Policeman in Colonial Chinese Literature.” Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s, edited by Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui, 29-66. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021.