Aparna Dharwadker

Faculty Webpage

Aparna Dharwadker

Biography

Aparna Dharwadker is Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies at UW-Madison, with expertise in postcolonial studies, modern and contemporary Indian theatre, contemporary world theatre, comparative theatre theory, and South Asian diasporic cultural forms. She is a two-time winner of the Joe Callaway prize, awarded biannually to the best book in theatre studies—for A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory, 1850 to the Present in 2020, and for Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947 in 2006. Professor Dharwadker’s collaborative scholarly translation of Mohan Rakesh’s iconic play, Ashadh ka ek din, appeared in the Penguin Classics series in 2015 under the title One Day in the Season of Rain. Her essays and articles have appeared in a range of journals and collections, including PMLA, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Research International, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, The Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre, and Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography. In March 2022, in collaboration with the Digital Collections Centre at UW-Madison’s Memorial Library, she launched the online Database of Modern Printed Drama in India, which contains about 17,000 entries covering 16 languages. Professor Dharwadker has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2022 and 1998), the American Institute of Indian Studies (2007 and 1998), the International Research Centre, Freie Universität, Berlin (2015-16 and 2011), the Newberry Library, and the Folger Library, among others. Her major intramural awards from the UW-Madison Graduate School and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation include the Kellett Mid-Career Award (2022-2027), the Vilas Associates Award (2018-2020), and the H.I. Romnes Fellowship for scholarship in the humanities (2007-12). Her most recent monograph, titled Cosmo-Modernism and Theatre in India: Writing and Staging Multilingual Modernisms, was published by Columbia University Press in 2025, and work in progress includes a study of the constitutive features of Indian theatrical modernity, titled Inventive Modernities and the Modernization of Urban Theatre in India.