Hi! I’m Mrinalini, a Rhodes Scholar (New York & Magdalen 2024) and MPhil student in intellectual history at Magdalen College, Oxford. I grew up between Chandigarh, Delhi, and New York, and graduated from Columbia University as salutatorian with honors in History and Mathematics.
My interests lie in the intellectual and cultural history of empire, global histories of Enlightenment, and the relationship between religion, gender, and political thought. At Columbia, my work spanned twentieth-century Indian women’s activism, eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary writings, gender in constitutional law, and algebraic and geometric topology. In my spare time, I enjoy knitting and visual art.
Writing
The Franco-Indian Enlightenment of Sylvia Murr. (Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2025)
A Topological Proof of the Riemann–Hurwitz Formula. (Columbia Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics, 2024)
‘An Appalling Document.’ A comparative analysis of James Bryce’s reports on German and Ottoman atrocities in WWI Britain. (Chicago Journal of History, 2023)
Beyond Geschichte and Itihāsa. Theorizing history from the margins in colonial India. (Gadfly Magazine, 2023)
Reclaiming Humanity, Removed in Space and Time. Rabindranath Tagore’s “Letter Renouncing Knighthood” in 1919 British India. (The Morningside Review, 2022)
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Research
The Lost Manuscript and the “Unmasked” Missionary. Pondichéry Jesuit contributions to Enlightenment and colonial fantasies of India. (Honors Thesis, Department of History, Columbia University, 2024)
Generating the Mapping Class Group. An Algebraic, Geometric, and Historical Survey. (Honors Thesis, Department of Mathematics, Columbia University, 2024; Columbia Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics, Thesis Issue, 2025)
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Other links
Writer and editor page, Columbia Undergraduate Law Review
Inaugural Letter from the Editors-in-Chief, Columbia Journal of Asia
Contributor page, Columbia Rose Teaching Fellows