I am a Fellow in English Literature at Exeter College, specialising in Romantic-era literature and visual culture. I am half Indian and grew up in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to Oxford to study Classics and English (BA, 2014-17). After graduating, I worked in rare book and antique dealerships in Melbourne and returned to the UK to work at Sotheby’s in London. I stayed in London for an MA in Art History, Curatorship, and Renaissance Culture at the Warburg Institute (2018-19), followed by my PhD at Tate Britain and the University of York (2019-23). Alongside my PhD, I worked in the Curatorial Department at Tate Britain, taught undergraduate students at the University of York, and set up “N-Zine,” a community publishing project based in North London. In my spare time, I write poetry and study Hindi.
Research:
As the nice hand of Geographic art
Draws the vast globe on a contracted chart…
— William Hayley, An Essay on History, 1781, p. 33
I am interested in intersections between literature, visual art, and mapping. My first monograph, entitled William Blake and the Cartographic Imagination: Maps, Diagrams, Networks, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. My current research focuses on global images in eighteenth-century literature and visual culture. Depictions of the earth or cosmos in the form of a globe appeared as much in scientific tracts and geography textbooks as in poetry, paintings, and satirical prints. Studying these global images can reveal the contested nature of cosmologies or worldviews during this period of war, colonisation, and revolution, when individuals and nations were re-imagining their relationship with a wider world. While my research at present focuses primarily on British global images, I aim to set the British material within a wider international framework. I am also interested in global and cosmological images up to the present day.
Teaching:
I teach English Literature 1760-1830 (Final Honour School Paper 5) to undergraduate students. I also support the teaching of students visiting Exeter College as part of the Williams-Exeter Programme at Oxford (WEPO).
I am keen to hear from students and researchers interested in literary geography, radicalism and dissent, William Blake, cartography, psychogeography, and small-press publishing.
Selected Publications and Talks:
‘“An album, a miscellany, a sort of patchwork”: “Curiosity,” Genre, and Literary Quality in Early British Reviews of The Dutt Family Album (1870),’ Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, 4 (1), 2025 (forthcoming).
‘“Symbols of Embodied Agency’: The Reception of William Blake’s Engravings for John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative (1796) in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture,’ Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (forthcoming, January 2025).
‘“Where is earth?”: Reading Global Vision and the View from Nowhere in Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and William Blake’s The Four Zoas’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 64 (4), 2024 (forthcoming, Winter 2024).
‘London Blakeans: The Legacy of William Blake in Contemporary Small-Press and Independent Publishing Networks in London,’ Publishing History (forthcoming, Autumn 2024).
Tate Artist Series: William Blake (forthcoming with Tate Publishing, October 2024).
‘Mapping Bunyan, Mapping Blake: William Blake’s (Anti-)Cartographic Imagination,’ Literary Geographies, 9 (1), 2023, 69-100.
‘Local Blake: London-based Small Presses, Urban Topography, and the Afterlives of Golgonooza,’ Global Blake, University of Lincoln, 11-13 January 2022.
‘Diagrammatic Blake: Tracing the Critical Reception of “The Mental Traveller,”’ Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 4, 2021.
‘“Forming the Fluctuating Globe”: Weaving Women and Corporeal Cartography in Blake’s Jerusalem,” VALA: The Journal of the Blake Society, 2, 2021, 104-7.
‘Mental Travel: An Interview with Iain Sinclair,’ Zoamorphosis, 19 April 2021.
