I teach and study modern literature, with interests in South Asia, modernism, the global Cold War, and migration.

My current book project, Ghosts into Ancestors: Literature, Religion, Mass Migration, will be the first comparative study of representations of the sacred — as a benign or terrifying force — in the literature of the South Asian diaspora. Placing cosmological and theological differences at the heart of how we think about world literature, Ghosts into Ancestors argues that it is religion—and not race—that holds the key to understanding the migrant’s struggle against uprooting. Beneath the politics of race, the book demonstrates, lies the more universal modern condition of self-forgetting. Working across several languages and faith traditions, the book suggests that literature remains our most durable way of communing with the dead, across national and cultural lines. Some of the book’s arguments have previously appeared in longform essays for The Point magazine: “Ethnic Studies” and “The Great Replacement.”

My second core research area focuses on twentieth-century Indian literature and arthouse cinema in Hindi and English. Here, my primary concern has been the extraordinary and widespread sense of disillusionment that followed decolonization in India, as in much of the former Third World. Broadly, my work suggests that this post-independence mohabhang (“disenchantment”, with connotations of a bitter, broken love) was a far more transformative aesthetic phenomenon than has previously been understood. Almost invariably, the illusions of the past continue to haunt the supposedly disillusioned text, forcing a bitter self-reckoning whose full implications can only be understood now, in retrospect. My research on Indian modernism has appeared in South Asia, JCMS, and in various edited volumes. You can read my public-facing writing here; and more about my scholarship here.

Prior to moving to Canada, I was a Lecturer in the History and Literature program at Harvard University, where I received the Alan Heimert Teaching Prize in 2023. I completed my PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania. In what feels like another life, I've also been a journalist and social worker in India.