My research focuses on the intersections of language ideology, political movements, and aesthetic form in the global twentieth century.
My first book, Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois and the Global Anglophone, was published in 2020 by Northwestern University Press. Thanks to a generous award from the Towards an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) program, it is available in an open access electronic version, as well as in clothbound and paperback editions. I developed the argument of Imperfect Solidarities, in part, through related articles on Gandhi, published in Social Dynamics, and on Du Bois, published in Callaloo.
In my second book project, I focus on South Asia, analyzing the shifting relationships between sound, speech, and writing across the languages of Hindi, Bengali (Bangla), and English. In a recent article in Comparative Literature, I demonstrate the utility of comparing the Chinese and Bengali experiences of vernacularization; in an essay published in Interventions, I theorize the overlapping vernacular of northern India and Pakistan that is sometimes called Hindustani.
I have a sustained secondary research interest in southern Africa, whose historical and linguistic complexity provide rich insights into the operations of language and culture in general. In the journal Black Camera, I explored the reverberations of sexuality and post-apartheid trauma in the cinema of democratic South Africa. In another article, published in the journal Social Dynamics, I examined the author function in world literature through the writing of the Mozambican intellectual C. Kamba Simango.
I am, finally, committed to the search for a feminist and anti-racist methodology for the comparative study of culture. You can find a (somewhat polemical) articulation of this method, focusing on contemporary debates around gendered violence, in the journal Feminist Africa; a more historically invested approach to this problem, focusing on the Indian-British cultural interface, was published in the edited collection India in Britain.
