Biography
I am a Lecturer in English Literature. I joined Edinburgh Napier in 2022 after a three-year postdoctoral research assistantship at the School of History in the University of Leeds. I received my PhD in English Literature from the University of Leeds.
My primary research focuses on colonial urban geographies, imperial handbooks and guidebooks, and early twentieth century and travel literature related to Britain and South Asia. My subsequent work links colonial and postcolonial studies, urban landscape analysis, heritage and legacy studies and gender studies. I have developed a significant section of my thesis in the co-edited volume, Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century: Spaces beyond the Centres (Palgrave, Dec 2022) with a chapter on the politics of historiography in early 19th century imperial handbooks on Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. I am currently developing my thesis into a monograph.
My postdoctoral research has developed in two interrelated directions. The AHRC funded project, "The Other from Within: Indian Anthropologists and the Birth of a Nation" at Leeds explores the historical study of anthropology in South Asia. I have focused on the curation of ethnographic collections in museums in India and the UK which were developed alongside colonial administration. This research is contracted for publication in a co-edited issue in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (Routledge), forthcoming.
In 2019, I was awarded a postdoctoral Anniversary Fellowship at Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh to work on Indian ocean studies and the conceptualisation of the Indian nation state in representative accounts of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago in novels published in the last 20 years. I have two forthcoming publications in ‘Postcolonial Texts’ and an edited volume from University of Wales Press.
My research has developed and co-produced projects in cultural and creative industries, especially museums. I have co-curated an award-winning museum intervention at the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow in 2022-23. I participated as one of the “community-curators” and worked with the “Curator of Discomfort” Zandra Yeaman and her team to re-contextualise existing items from the museums store and collection and also participated in podcasts and interviews related to this impact driven project. I continue to be associated with the “community curators” team and contribute in an advisory capacity.
My teaching has developed from this research. At Edinburgh Napier I teach courses on Migration and Decolonization, 19th century literature and postcolonial fiction and film. In 2022 I also offered and taught a course on the Mlitt program on global queer travel literature at the University of Strathclyde in 2022.
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