Publications

Coedited special issue on Female Travelling Performers in South Asia in a peer reviewed journal, forthcoming 2026.

Coedited volume on Crime Fiction in Vernacular South Asia (under contract), forthcoming 2026.

'The Garden, the Court, the Kotha and the Recording Studio: The Many Performing Spaces of the Tawa’if' in Katherine Schofield and Margaret E Walker eds. Hindustani Music Between Empires: Relational Histories, forthcoming 2025.

'A Conversation on Feminist Digital Humanities.' Frazier, Jessica, Tamar Carroll, Shweta Sachdeva Jha, and Leandra Zarnow, Journal of Feminist Scholarship 26 (Spring): 10.23860/jfs.2025.26.02. digitalcommons.uri.edu/jfs/vol26/iss26/2/ 

'The Tawa’if in Colonial India: Changing Livelihoods and Emerging Technologies (1790s-1920s)’ in Anna Morcom and Neelam Raina eds. Creative Economies of Culture in South Asia: Craftspeople and Performers (Routledge, 2025), 89-99.

Bathing Women: Desire, Wonder, and Water in Versions of a Persian Tale, Editorial Feature, 2024 (Commissioned Editorial Feature/Curationist Mhz Foundation Fellowship)

'Songbook to the Postcard: Courtesans and Their Forgotten Cultural Legacy' in Seema Bhalla ed. Ganika: In the Visual Culture of the 19th to 20th Century India (Art  & Deal, 2024), 92-108. (Commissioned/Crafts Museum, Delhi)

'The Women of Miranda House: Building Archival Collections, Digital Humanities and Feminist Digital History', South Asian Popular Culture 2023, 21:3, 279-289, DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2023.2271273

'Significance of Narrating Island-ness: Andaman and Nicobar Islands in Contemporary Indian Writing',  Sambhasan, Vol. 3, Issue 4, (October - December 2022), 25-40. https://mu.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/25-40-Significance-of-Narrating-Island-ness_Andaman-and-Nicobar-Islands-inContemporary-Indian-Writing.pdf

'Ṣadā: Her-story and ‘Echoes of Nationhood’', Writing Initiatives, Serendipityarts.org (06 October 2022). https://serendipityarts.org/writing_initiatives/sounds-nationhood. (Commissioned Feature/Serendipity Writing Grants) 

'From Ayyar to the Detective/Secret Agent Who Loved Chewing Gum: Ibn-e-Safi's Fiction in Mid-twentieth Century South Asia' in Shraddha A Singh ed. Speculation and Detection: Explorations in Genre Fiction (Worldview Publications, 2022), 109-125. 

Looking back at Bapu: Gandhi and Children's Picture Books in Contemporary India',  in Satishchandra Kumar, Kanchana Mahadevan, Meher Bhoot and Rajesh Kharat eds. Gandhi Then and Now:  Autobiographies and Conversations (Speaking Tiger Books, 2022), 128-148

‘Situating the Tawaíf as a Poet: Nostalgia, Urdu Literary Cultures and Vernacular Modernity’ in Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen eds. The Bollywood Islamicate: Idioms, Histories and Imaginaries (Intellect Books, Orient Blackswan, 2022), 106-131.

‘Locating Romance and Women Writers in Urdu Literature: Hijab Imtiaz Ali’s Genre Fiction’, in Haris Qadeer, Yasser Arafath eds. Sultana’s Sisters: Gender, Genres, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction (Routledge, 2021),  47-64.  https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003002062

‘Tracing Terror and the Uncanny in the Gothic Urdu Fiction of Hijab Imtiaz Ali’ in Katarzyna Ancuta and Deimantas Valančiūnas eds. South Asian Gothic: Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media (University of Wales Press 2021), 81-96. 

‘Tawa’if as Poet and Patron: Rethinking Women’s Self Representation’ in Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley eds. Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia (Duke University Press, 2015), 141-164.

 ‘Frames of Cinematic History: The Tawa’if in Umrao Jan and Pakeezah’ in Manju Jain ed. Narratives of Indian Cinema (Primus Books, 2009), 167-192.

‘Eurasian Women as Tawa’if Singers and Recording Artists: Entertainment and Identity-making in Colonial India’ in African and Asian Studies 8.3, (2009), 268-287. https://doi.org/10.1163/156921009X458118

'From Delhi to London’, Londoc (University of London Magazine for Postgraduates) Summer Term 2006.