Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Alok Oak

Alok Oak is a historian of modern South Asia and the British Empire and joins the Department of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures on a Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Previously, Alok was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh (2023-24) and a Visiting Research Scholar and Tutor at the School of History, University of St Andrews (2022-23). 

Alok received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 2022. His doctoral dissertation is an intellectual biography of the Indian nationalist leader and conservative thinker- Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920). His current postdoctoral project - Indian Secularisation: Modern Hindu Reform, Vernacular Enlightenment and the Marathi Public Sphere (1920-1970)- seeks to construct an intellectual history of Indian secularisation through the interconnected prisms of the Marathi textual corpus on Hindu religious traditions and the vibrant public discourse on religious reform in Maharashtra during the late colonial and early postcolonial years.

His most recent publications are:

• " 'Epic' Past, 'Modern' Present: The Mahabharata and Modern Nationalism in Colonial Western India", in Milinda Banerjee and Julian Strube (eds) The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2024): 48-74.
• "Saving Indian Villages: British Empire, the Great Depression and Gandhi's Civil Disobedience Movement", Studies in Indian Politics 10, no. 2 (December, 2022): 227-41.