Francesca Orsini is a literary historian and is interested in bringing a multilingual perspective to literary cultures of South Asia and to world literature. She is Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy and was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. She is the author of The Hindi Public Sphere (2002) and Print and Pleasure (2009), and the editor of, among others, Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (2006) and Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Cultures (2010) and, most recently, Hinglish Live (2022, with Ravikant),The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form (2022, with Neelam Srivastava and Laetitia Zecchini), and the special issue « Magazines and World Literature » of the Journal of World Literature 8.2 (2023, with Patricia Novillo-Corvalan).
Her most recent monograph is East of Delhi: Multilingual literary culture and world literature (Oxford University Press, 2023). She co-edits with Debjani Ganguly the series Cambridge Studies in World Literatures and Cultures, and with Whitney Cox the forthcoming Cambridge History of Indian Literature.