Adhira Mangalagiri is a Lecturer (U.S. Assistant Professor) in the Department of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on twentieth century Chinese and Hindi/Urdu literatures and engages with the fields of world literature, Global South studies, and postcolonial studies. Her book, States of Disconnect: China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming with Columbia University Press), 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 research has recently appeared in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, the Journal of World Literature, Economic and Political Weekly, Comparative Literature Studies, and in the edited volume Beyond Pan-Asianism (2021). She serves as an Assistant Editor for Comparative Critical Studies and a General Editor for the China-India Studies database. She is the 2015 recipient of the American Comparative Literature Association’s (ACLA) Horst Frenz Prize. She previously served as the Victor and William Fung Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Asia Center, and is currently an Associate at the Asia Center. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago.