Aditya Bahl is a PhD candidate in English at Johns Hopkins University. His writings about art, literature, and politics have appeared and are forthcoming in New Left Review, The Nation, Economic and Political Weekly, The Caravan, Jacobin, and Himal, among other publications. He is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry including MUKT (NYC: Organism for Poetic Research, 2021) and NAME AMEN (Malmö: Timglaset, 2018). He currently serves as the senior Associate Editor for English Literary History.

His dissertation recovers an archive of small and underground literary magazines that were published in Punjab (India) during the 1960s-70s. Circulating across a rural landscape shaped by the clash between the US-sponsored Green Revolution and the Mao-inspired Naxalite insurgency, these magazines were frequently banned and destroyed by the Indian state. Today, only fragments of these magazines survive, scattered across obscure rural and peri-urban locations,  often still shrouded in mystery. Combining ethnographic fieldwork, literary criticism, and archival study, his work tracks how these magazines imagined a literary world-system that was grounded in the peripheral experiences of a peasantry suddenly implicated in global networks of agrarian capitalism.