After spending the greater part of my adult life as a student at the University of Delhi, India, I arrived in Oxford to read for the DPhil in English in 2012. As an Ertegun Scholar, I wrote a DPhil thesis entitled "Unlikely Readers: Negotiating the Book in Colonial South Asia, c. 1857–1914." That work reflects my longstanding research interests in reading practices, the history of the book, and the cultural and literary history of South Asia.
Ertegun House kept me in sandwiches for four years, gave me an incomparable work space and the world’s most comfortable office chair, excellent kitchen conversations, a wonderful mentor, and the financial support to read and write, organise conferences, workshops, and a seminar series ("Unconventional Archives: Literature and the Uses of History” in January 2014, “The Global History of the Book, 1780 to the present" in December 2014, and “The Archive and Forms of Knowledge” from May 2014 to June 2015).
Select Academic Publications
The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices. Ed. Elleke Boehmer, Rouven Kunstmann, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, and Asha Rogers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
“On Not Reading The Soldier’s Pocket-book for Field Service.” Journal of Victorian Culture 22.1 (2017): 40 –56.
“Of Greasy Notebooks and Dirty Newspapers: Reading the Illegible in The Village in the Jungle.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50.1 (March 2015): 59–73.
“Annie Besant’s Wake Up, India: A Plea for Social Reform (1913).” Fighting Words: Resisting the Imperial World. Ed. Benjamin Mountford, Dominic Davies, and Erica Lombard (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017). 89–102.
“Death and the Automobile.” Shrapnel Minima: Essays from Underground. Ed. Prasanta Chakravarty (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014).18–24.