Education
M.A. Jawaharlal Nehru University (2001)
M.Phil. Jawaharlal Nehru University, History (2005)
Ph.D. University of London, History (2010)
Courses
HIST 117 / ASST 117 / GBST 117
Bombay/Mumbai: Making of a Modern MetropolisHIST 220 / ASST 222(S)
History and Society in India and South Asia: c. 2000 to 1700s CEINST 221 / ASST 221 / HIST 221
The Making of Modern South Asia: 1750-1950 CEHIST 391 / ASST 391 / GBST 391
When India was the World: Trade, Travel and History in the Indian OceanHIST 415 / ASST 415 / COMP 415
Gods and Kings: Historical Narratives from IndiaHIST 488 T / REL 388 / ASST 488 / GBST 488(S)
Gandhi: Nationalism, Philosophy, and LegacyBiography
Aparna Kapadia is a historian of South Asia. Her research interests include the cultural and literary history of pre-modern and modern South Asia, Indian regional traditions, and the Indian Ocean. She has co-edited a volume entitled The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (2010) and is the author of several journal articles. She is currently working on a monograph exploring the mutually constitutive relationship between literature and political culture in pre-colonial Gujarat, western India.
Aparna has an undergraduate degree in history from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai and MA and MPhil degrees from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She received her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2010 and subsequently held a Mellon Post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford. She was Assistant Professor of History at Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) before coming to Williams College in 2013.
Selected Publications
Kapadia, Aparna, ‘Universal Poet, Local Kings: Sanskrit, the Rhetoric of Kingship and Local Kingdoms in Gujarat’ in Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh (eds), After Timur Left: Multiple Spaces of Cultural Production and Circulation in Fifteenth-century North India, OUP, New Delhi, 2014.
Kapadia, Aparna, ‘The Last Cakravartin?: The Gujarat Sultan as ‘Universal King’ in Fifteenth Century Sanskrit Poetry’, Medieval History Journal, vol. 16, no. 1 (April 2013):63-88.
Kapadia, Aparna, ‘Alexander Forbes and the Making of a Regional History,’ in Edward Simpson and Aparna Kapadia (eds), The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010.
Simpson, Edward and Aparna Kapadia (eds), The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010.
Kapadia, Aparna, ‘What Makes the Head Turn: The Narratives of Kānhaḍade and the Dynamics of Legitimacy in Western India’, SAGAR, vol. 18, Spring 2008, pp. 87-100.
Research Interests
South Asian history, literary and popular culture, Indian Ocean history, history of food and culinary practices.
Theses Advised
Benjamin Nathan, ’15 – The Administrative Strategy of Thomas Stamford Raffles in Java 1811-1816
