I am a scholar of South Asian visual culture, literary and cultural criticism, postcolonial studies, and gender and sexuality. My work explores the politicization of popular literature, storytelling, and history recording in British India. I am interested in studying literary and visual genres printed in periodicals that shaped colonial modernity and historiography. My articles and book reviews have appeared in The International Journal of Comic Art, ImageText, Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture, and South Asian Review.

I am currently an Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), at Columbia University. I received my doctoral degree in South Asian Studies and Comparative Literature from MESAAS, Columbia University.

My essay, “Against Imitation: Anticolonial Caricatures in Basantak or the Bengali Punch,” is the Winner of 2022 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals’ Expanding the Field Prize. The essay was published in the Victorian Periodicals Review, Spring 2023.

I am the recipient of the 2024 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching and Columbia’s Teacher’s Scholars Program Fellowship for the Academic year 2023-24. The TSP Fellowship has supported me in offering the lower-division course ‘Introduction to Twentieth-Century South Asian Literature’ in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.

Drawing on the digital humanities and cultural informatics training I received at Jadavpur University’s School of Cultural Texts and Records, I created ‘The Antilibrarian Project’ on Instagram, which now has more than 23k+ followers. Here, I regularly write book reviews promoting BIPOC authors, World Literature, and Literature in translations to showcase voices and perspectives of culturally diverse aesthetic traditions and literary trends.

Along with six other colleagues (professors and post-doctoral fellows), I have established ‘The Empire and Colonialism Caucus’ at NAVSA (North Atlantic Victorian Studies Association), centering around Bengali-Urdu-Hindu-language print culture dedicated to studying the remnants of Victorian-Indian print networks. The caucus is a network of interdisciplinary scholars working on nineteenth-century empire and colonialism. Our scholarship and teaching center on postcolonial studies, critical race theory, transimperialism, transnationalism, and feminist and queer theory. The caucus is an effort to broaden the field of Victorian Studies by focusing on non-British and non-white cultural producers, historical subjects, and perspectives on colonial and imperial histories. We promote conversations around caste, race, colonialism, indigeneity, slavery, and indenture in the nineteenth-century British colonies. We offer scholars and students contexts, networks, and spaces to connect, eventually leading to conference panels, symposia, special issues, and peer mentoring. 

Education:

Ph.D., Columbia University, 2024
M.A., M.Phil. Columbia University, 2020
B.A., St. Xavier’s College (University of Calcutta), 2013