Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa

mrinalini.wadhwa@all-souls.ox.ac.uk

Research Topic: 'Mystical India': A Global Intellectual History 

Supervisors: Ruth Harris & Faisal Devji

I am a Fellow by Examination at All Souls College, Oxford, with an interest in exceptions, limit-cases, and denied possibilities in the historical encounter between Europe and India. My doctoral project traces how India came to be associated with mysticism and spirituality since the eighteenth century, treating “mystical India” not only as an Orientalist trope, but as a resource through which historical actors developed alternative universalisms to reimagine their social and political order. Elsewhere, I have written about the circulation of Jesuit missionary texts to Enlightenment France and British India, the politics of teaching Sanskrit in Victorian universities, citizenship law in the French empire, and the political thought of Indian feminists.

At Oxford, I co-convene the seminars in Global Intellectual History and South Asian Intellectual History and co-founded the reading group Eliot as Historian: The Historical Novel in Intellectual History, where, taking inspiration from Virginia Woolf's remark that "the overflow of George Eliot's capacious mind should have spread itself... upon history and biography," we discuss how novels such as Middlemarch and War and Peace offered alternative means of writing history that crystalized alongside the discipline itself. I also serve as Primary Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog.

I completed my MPhil in Intellectual History at Oxford, where I was a Rhodes Scholar (New York & Magdalen 2024), and my B.A. in History and Mathematics at Columbia, where I worked as a Research Assistant at the Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia Law School. Before that, I grew up between Chandigarh, New Delhi, and New York.

Publications

“Indian Feminists and Orientalist Fantasies: Seeta Parmanand’s Reimagining of Hindu Law,” Journal of the History of Ideas 87, no. 4 (2026): https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.0.a1002455.

For other essays and interviews, see here.

Prizes and Funding

• British Association for South Asian Studies Master's Dissertation Prize, 2026
• Best Dissertation in Cohort Prize for MSt/MPhil Intellectual History, 2026
• Salutatorian of Columbia College, 2024
• Albert Marion Elsberg Prize for Excellence in History, 2024
• Departmental Honors in Mathematics and History, 2024
• Junior Phi Beta Kappa, 2023
• North American Conference on British Studies Undergraduate Essay Prize, 2023
• Taraknath Das Foundation Award for Excellence in Asian Studies, 2022