Francesca Orsini is Reader in the Literatures of North India. She took her undergraduate degree in Hindi at the University of Venice, followed by a long spell in Delhi. Her PhD research at SOAS was on the Hindi public sphere of the 1920s and '30s. She taught at the University of Cambridge for 11 years and joined SOAS in 2006. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Hindi literature.
Dr Orsini's main area of research is modern Hindi literature, where she has published on Hindi literary life during the nationalist period; commercial genres such as detective fiction and "social romances"; women writers and women's journals; nineteenth-century commercial publishing in Hindi and Urdu. She has organized several workshops and conferences, including one on Love in South Asia.