New Books Network Ananya Vajpeyi, "Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities" (Women Unlimited Ink, 2025)
Feb 23, 2026
Ananya Vajpeyi, professor and author of Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities, explores 13 cities through literary and scholarly lenses. She discusses multilingual childhoods and how language shapes access to others. Conversations touch on memory, monuments, architecture and public space, gendered mobility, camps and trauma, and the persistent mood of loss and belonging.
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Multilingual Childhood Shaped Place Memory
- Ananya Vajpeyi remembers early multilingual childhood across Mexico, the US, and India shaping place-memory from age three to five.
- Her mother tried to preserve Spanish; she later learned French at Alliance Française and retained layered linguistic memories tied to places.
Using Photographs To Reach Historical Feeling
- While researching war and genocide in Amsterdam, Ananya Vajpeyi used photographs and film to probe knowledge gaps left by texts.
- She cites W.G. Sebald's use of found photographs as evocative, fictional devices that reveal historical feeling beyond documentation.
Visiting Kashmiri Transit Camps Revealed Erasure Not Extermination
- Vajpeyi visited Kashmiri Hindu transit camps in 2005 and contrasted them with concentration camps to probe intent and design.
- She observed barrack-like housing that erased cultural markers, prompting questions about extermination versus rehabilitation.
