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 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:
‘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.
