• Archives
• Museums
• Public History
• Community knowledge
• Oral history
• Digital archiving
• South Asian partition

Priyanka Seshadri leads the archives at the University. She has spent more than eight years working with museum and archival collections of oral histories, paper documents, art, and digital records. For many years she conducted oral history interviews on the South Asian Partition, displacement, migration, and institutional histories. She has an abiding interest in community archiving, specifically developing collaborative approaches to collection-building informed by legal and ethical frameworks.

She has previously worked at the Centre for Public History at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, the Centre for Community Knowledge at Dr B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi, the Partition Museum, Amritsar, and Eka Cultural Resources. She was involved in developing an oral history collection and archival book for the Indian Museum, Kolkata, and expanding the Partition Museum’s collection of material artefacts and oral histories. She also led the Partition Museum’s first international exhibition, co-curated with the Manchester Museum.

She has a BA from the University of Delhi, a second BA from the University of Oxford, and an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, all in the subject of history. 

At the University, she works with a team of archivists on collections covering a diverse range of subjects and teaches an elective on Library Archiving, a practice-led course introducing students to the world of libraries and archives.