Neha Tiwari

Neha Tiwari is a joint-PhD Candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies and the Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Program at Penn. Prior to joining Penn, she completed a master’s in Oriental Studies with a focus on Jain literature from Ghent University, where she studied Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Apabhramsha. 

Neha’s research historicizes the genre of medieval story texts or kathā and explores how compositional practices and literary tastes and themes in the “Sanskrit cosmopolis” and neighboring cultural and literary formations are interconnected. By studying the hugely popular story cycles and tales featuring King Vikrama in Sanskrit, early Gujarati, Persian, and Hindi/Urdu, she also wants to understand how kingship—real, ideal, and/or fictional—was articulated in these materials and what that might tell us about the social and cultural worlds in which these tales were composed and circulated. Pairing scholarship in Global Medieval Studies and World Literature, she uses medieval story texts in her classes to discuss how story texts circulate and are translated/adapted in varied contexts, and to illuminate issues of genre, literary style, taste, and patronage.

With her background in language teaching, Neha brings over a decade of experience teaching Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu, and Persian, at various institutions and privately. She is also interested in developing a historical linguistic understanding of New Indo-Aryan languages and in further research into modern Hindi-Urdu grammar and has co-published papers on these themes. Additionally, she is the co-author of Reading the Rāmcaritmānas, a companion text intended to help readers access Tulsidas’s Awadhi-language Ramayana—indisputably the most-widely-known literary or religious work in north India—in the original Awadhi.