Ulrike Stark

Ulrike Stark is a scholar of modern Hindi literature and South Asian book history. Her main research interests are in the cultural and intellectual history of North India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a specific focus on print culture, public intellectual life, education, and gender. She also has a long-standing interest in contemporary Hindi fiction and literary translation. 

Ulrike Stark was trained in Classical and Modern Indology as well as French and Hispanic literatures at the University of Bonn, Germany. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bamberg and received her Habilitation in Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Heidelberg in 2004. Stark taught at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University for more than a decade before she joined the SALC Department in 2005. Stark’s early research focused on Hindi literature. Her first monograph, Tage der Unzufriedenheit: Identität und Gesellschaftsbild in den Romanen muslimischer Hindischriftsteller, 1965-90 (Stuttgart: Harrassowitz, 1994), analyzes the depiction of Indian Muslim life and identity in the novels of Muslim Hindi authors. While Stark continues to write on contemporary Hindi fiction, most of her recent research focuses on South Asian book history and the intellectual and cultural history of North India during the colonial period. She is the author of an Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008) and has published widely on Hindi and Urdu print culture. She is also the originator and principal investigator of a digital humanities project titled "Chapakhana. Mapping the Spread of Print in South Asia" [see link below]. Stark is currently completing a biography of North Indian intellectual and educator Raja Shivaprasad ‘Sitara-e Hind’ (1823-1895).