Biography
I grew up in Kolkata, India, where I studied English Literature at Jadavpur University before coming to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (University College). I subsequently completed an MPhil and PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge. After completing an MPhil and PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, and spending a year working as a software programmer in the publishing industry, I returned to academic research. Following appointments at Cambridge and the University of Liverpool, where I was Professor of English Literature, I joined Exeter College, Oxford, in 2019 as Fellow and Tutor in English, and am Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the Faculty of English.
Research
My research explores how literature, travel, and cross-cultural encounters shaped the early modern world. Beginning with work on Renaissance romance and prose fiction, it has increasingly focused on England’s interactions with the wider world, and on the ways mobility, exchange, and translation transformed ideas of identity, nationhood, race, and empire.
My early work examined Renaissance romance and prose fiction, resulting in publications including Robert Greene’s Planetomachia (2007), Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570–1620 (2011), and Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama (2017, co-edited with Nick Davis), and I am currently editing Shakespeare’s Cymbeline for the Fourth Series of Arden Shakespeare. Much of my work has also centred on travel writing and global cultural encounters. With Tim Youngs, I co-edited The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019), and together we edit the Cambridge Elements in Travel Writing series. I am also the volume editor for Elizabethan Levant Trade and South Asia in the forthcoming Oxford University Press edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations.
My recent books have explored England’s early encounters with the wider world from fresh global perspectives. Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023) reconstructs the first English embassy to the Mughal court between 1614 and 1619. It was named a Book of the Year by The Spectator, Prospect, and History Today, longlisted for the Cundill History Prize, shortlisted for the Duff Cooper and Wolfson History Prizes, and received the 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. My latest book, This Little World: A New History of Tudor England (2026), offers a new account of Tudor England through the lives of the merchants, migrants, diplomats, artists, travellers, and refugees who connected England to a rapidly changing world.
Alongside this work, I have continued to develop collaborative projects in heritage, digital humanities, and public engagement. I particularly enjoy collaborative and interdisciplinary research that brings together different disciplines, languages, and perspectives, including projects such as Envisioning the Indian City and the ERC-funded TIDE (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in Early Modern England). Research undertaken with the Runnymede Trust on migration, identity, belonging, and empire helped shape the European Research Council-funded TRACTION (Teaching Race, Belonging, Empire and Migration) project, which now forms the basis of a professional development platform for secondary school teachers hosted by the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.
Teaching
I teach across the breadth of early modern English literature and culture, from Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, Donne, and Milton to lesser-known writers whose works illuminate the social, political, and cultural worlds of the period. My teaching ranges from Joseph Hall’s satirical voyage Mundus alter et idem to plays about rent inflation in sixteenth-century London, reflecting my interest in placing canonical texts alongside overlooked voices and histories.
At Oxford, I teach undergraduate papers on English literature and its historical and intellectual contexts from 1500 to 1760, including their intersections with Classics and History, and I supervise graduate research in early modern literature, travel writing, book history, and cultural history.
I warmly welcome enquiries from prospective graduate students interested in pursuing research in any of these areas.
Media and Other Work
I am committed to bringing academic research to wider audiences. As a BBC New Generation Thinker, I regularly present television and radio programmes, including the BBC Four documentary Tales of Tudor Travel: The Explorer’s Handbook, based on Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, and BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature programmes on Thomas Stephens and the Kristapurana, Robert Greene, and other subjects in early modern literary and cultural history.
I am a Fellow of the British Academy and Vice-President of the Hakluyt Society, and sit on the councils and advisory boards of a number of learned societies and professional bodies, including the AHRC Peer Review College and the UK Committee on Research Integrity.