South Asia Studies
PhD Student
Education
• MA in Oriental Languages and Culture (India), Ghent University
• MA in Economics, Delhi School of Economics
• BTech in Electrical Engineering, IIT Kanpur
Bio
Neha Tiwari is currently pursuing her PhD at the Department of South Asia Studies at UPenn. 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.
Driven by a profound passion for the languages and literatures of South Asia, Neha has co-published papers on linguistic themes related to modern Hindi-Urdu; additionally, she is the co-author of Reading the Rāmcaritmānas, a companion text intended to help readers access Tulsidas’s Awadhi Ramayana in the original. She brings over a decade of experience teaching Hindi at various academic institutions and privately and has also taught Sanskrit, Urdu, and Persian professionally.
Neha's research primarily focuses on exploring literary articulations of ideal kings and kingship in medieval South Asia through a study of narrative texts in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Persian, as well as early Hindi and Gujarati. Her PhD project focuses on the narratives surrounding King Vikramaditya.
Research Interests
Kingship in Medieval South Asia, Narrative literature in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, and early Hindi and Gujarati; Indo-Persian literature; Genres and modes of historical writing in South Asia; Multilingualism in South Asia.
Selected Publications
Books
Rupert Snell with Neha Tiwari. Reading the Rāmcaritmānas: A Companion to the Awadhi Ramayana of Tulsidas. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2023.
Rupert Snell. The Self and the World: Autobiographical Readings in Hindi. Edited by Neha Tiwari. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan 2024 (forthcoming).
Papers
Andrea Drocco and Neha Tiwari. ”A Pragmatic Approach to Compound Verbs in Hindi/Urdu: The Case of (Inter)subjectivity.” Linguistica e Filologia, vol 40 (2020), 157–195.
Andrea Drocco and Neha Tiwari. “Atypical Compound Verb Constructions in Hindi/Urdu: The Case of Transitive Polar Verbs with Intransitive Vector Verbs.” Annali di Ca’ Foscari, serie orientale, 56 (2020), 307–334.