Francesca Orsini is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and the author of The Hindi Public Sphere (2002) and Print and Pleasure (2009), and editor of Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (2006) and Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Cultures (2010). Her edited volume on Hinglish (with Ravikant) has recently apperead with Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi (2022). She is interested in literary multilingualism in the longue durée and has just finished a book provisionally entitled Multilingual Literary History: North India and World Literature. She has also recently completed a research project (funded by the European Research Council) called Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies: for a new approach to world literature from the perspective of North India, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa. 

She co-edits with Debjani Ganguly the new series Cambridge Studies in World Literatures and Cultures, is an editor of the Journal of World Literature, and is currently part of two research projects: one led by Anastasia Pilliavsky (KCL) on Fugitive Words: India’s politics in its vernaculars, and the other led by Phiroze Vasunia (UCL) on Comparative Classics: Greece, Rome, and India.