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Material Texts: Priya Nambrath (University of Pennsylvania), "Scribal Worlds in Motion: Loss, Identity, Afterlives"

  • Monday, February 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library


Priya Nambrath (University of Pennsylvania), the Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of Material Texts will present a talk titled “Scribal Worlds in Motion: Loss, Identity, Afterlives.”

Priya writes:

"In this presentation, I examine the retrospective framing and interpretation of a transcontinental manuscript archive housed at the Bodleian Library, comprising early 16th to early 20th century materials in Sanskrit and several Indian vernaculars, as a predominantly scientific corpus. Through close attention to material form, patterns of use, and modes of accumulation, I argue that the collection is more productively understood as a scribal family archive: an accretive, practical inheritance shaped by apprenticeship, repair, partial copying, and everyday textual labor. The archive’s heterogeneity, previously treated as a problem to be resolved through classification, emerges instead as evidence of a distinct archival logic oriented toward continuity of practice rather than canon formation.

Tracing how twentieth-century scholarly intervention reconstituted this lived archive into a coherent scientific resource, reshaping both its organization and its historical legibility, I conclude by proposing archives as relational and historically produced objects, whose coherence is enacted through use, movement, and interpretation rather than discovered as an intrinsic property, and whose meanings remain fundamentally unfinished." 

Priya Nambrath is a PhD Candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies at UPenn, researching the applied practice of mathematics and astronomy in the sociocultural life of medieval and pre-modern Kerala in south India. Her dissertation research has been supported by the Fulbright, Hopkinson and other awards. She is the current Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of Material Texts, from whom you hear on a weekly basis during the fall and spring semesters this year.