Aparna Dharwadker

Aparna received her Ph.D. in English Literary Studies from Penn State in 1990, and joined the UW-Madison faculty in Fall 2001. Her principal research and teaching interests are in modern Indian and postcolonial theatre, contemporary world theatre, comparative modern drama and theatre theory, diaspora theatre, and Restoration and eighteenth-century British theatre. She is a two-time winner of the Joe A. Callaway Prize, awarded biannually for the best book in drama and theatre: for Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947 (University of Iowa Press, 2005) in 2006, and for A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory, 1850 to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2019) in 2020. Aparna has held yearlong fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1998 and 2022), the American Institute of Indian Studies (1998 and 2007-8), the International Research Centre in Berlin (2011 and 2015-16), the Folger Shakespeare Libray, and the Newberry Library, among others. Her intramural research awards at UW-Madison, funded by the Graduate School and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, include the H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship (2007-12), the Vilas Associates Award (2018-20), and the Kellett Mid-Career Award (2022-27). She has also received essay prizes from Modern Drama (1996) and the American Society for Theatre Research (2014).

Aparna’s essays and articles have appeared in a range of journals and collections, including PMLA, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Studies in English Literature, Studies in Philology, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Theatre Research International, South Central Review, The Blackwell Companion to Restoration Drama, Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, and The Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre. In 2015, she published a collaborative translation of Mohan Rakesh’s modernist Hindi play, Ashadh ka ek din (1958) under the title One Day in the Season of Rain (Penguin Classics). A Poetics of Modernity, a scholarly edition of modern Indian theatre theory in English and English translation, covers eleven languages and contains 76 selections from book-length works, essays, lectures, prefatory materials, letters, autobiographies, interviews, and memoirs by playwrights, directors, actors, designers, activists, and policy-makers. Aparna’s monograph, Cosmo-Modernism and Theatre in India: Writing and Staging Multilingual Modernisms is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in the Modernist Latitudes Series (2024), and Contested Modernities and the Modernization of Urban Theatre in India is a monograph in progress. In 2022 she launched the Database of Modern Printed Drama in India, containing more than 17,000 entries, in collaboration with the Digital Collections Centre at the University of Wisconsin Libraries.

Aparna has lectured widely at institutions in the U.S. and abroad, including the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Yale University, University of Toronto, Freie Universität (Berlin), Washington University, Rutgers University, University of Georgia, Delhi University, and Jawaharlal Nehru University. She serves, or has served, on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research (2018-21), the editorial/advisory boards of Contemporary Literature (2016- ), Studies in Theatre and Performance (2021-), and Theatre Survey (2023-), the guest faculty for the Mellon School of Theatre and Performance Research at Harvard (2013), the Fulbright Screening Committee for India (2006), the Gerald Kahan Prize Committee of ASTR (2005-08), and the editorial board of Genre (1991-95). In 2024 Aparna will begin a five-year term on the Executive Committee of the MLA Forum on Drama and Performance.