Francesca Orsini is Reader in the Literatures of North India at SOAS. Her main area of research is modern Hindi literature, where she has published on Hindi literary life during the nationalist period; commercial genres such as detective fiction and “social romances”; women writers and women’s journals; nineteenth-century commercial publishing in Hindi and Urdu. Her recent books include Print and Pleasure: the genres of commercial publishing in nineteenth-century north India, and an edited collection, Hindi and Urdu Before the Divide.