Interests

My academic work has been mainly in the areas of English Colonial Writing on India, Postcolonial Studies, Posthumanism and Cultural Studies (including celebrity studies, digital culture studies and superheroes). My more recent work has focused on various forms of precarity and precarious lives, and has resulted in books and essays on Human Rights and Literature, Dalit Literature, Extreme Cultures, Ecoprecarity, and Bhopal. Current work in Celebrity Studies has examined celebrity-desecration, charisma, celebrity philanthropy, the victim-celebrity. Posthumanism remains an abiding concern and work has appeared regularly in journals and anthologies as well.

Within traditional literary studies, the focus has been evenly distributed, from the Early Modern to the Romantics (with essays on travel writing in both eras, on the major poets, Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth and others like Felicia Hemans), transnationalism in English literature, and contemporary authors like David Mitchell, Michael Cunningham, William Gibson, WS Merwin, and others. I have also published consistently on graphic novels and comics, in major journals such as Image and Text, Narrative, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, CounterText, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, South Asian Review, Biography, besides anthologies from Cambridge UP, Routledge and other publishers, and two full-length books. Extensive publications have also appeared in postcolonial studies, with work on Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Dalit lifewriting, Partition graphic texts, among others.

My most sustained work has been within English colonial writing, working primarily with non-fictional texts, from the 17th century till the early 20th century. My largest projects to date, the three 5-volume sets, Women in Colonial India: Historical Documents and Sources, Colonial Education and India and Indian Travel Writing, have mined multiple dimensions of the colonial period. I have also published some popular writing and compilations from the colonial archive, to do mainly with the 1857 'Mutiny' and life in British India.

There is also a body of journalistic writings, from the 1990s in Deccan Herald, Deccan Chronicle, Daily News and Analysis, and more recently in The Wire, Telangana Today, and The Hindu Business Line.