I am an Assistant Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy where I specialize in representations of nationalism and cultural belonging in colonial-era and modern Indian literature. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and M.A. degrees in South Asian Studies and English from the University of Michigan in 2009. My research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and theory with a focus on South Asia, theory of the novel, global literatures of protest and resistance, contemporary South Asian diasporic literature and film, and British imperial philosophies and literatures of empire. My articles and reviews have been published in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

My book manuscript, Imagining Bharat: Colonialism, Nationalism, and the Politics of Form in the Indian Novel, 1880-1920, is an interdisciplinary study of anticolonial and nationalist thinking as it evolved in the turn-of-the-century Indian novel. It examines how the burgeoning genre formed a rich and generative space within which Indian authors often linked their qualified acceptance of British colonialism to unique imaginings of India as a primordial Hindu homeland called Bharat. A term appropriated from ancient religious texts, Bharat exists today as the alter ego of India and was proclaimed in the Indian Constitution to be the genuine name of the country in an appositive phrase: “India, that is, Bharat.” As demonstrated by the continued success of Hindu nationalists in Indian politics, a particularly restrictive understanding of Bharat predominates today, one that endangers the country’s avowed secularism and sizeable Muslim minority.

Yet, as my book demonstrates, the imagining of India as Bharat was in fact quite varied and often strikingly inclusive at the turn of the twentieth century. From the start of so-called Muslim rule in India in the late medieval period to the advent of British colonialism in the mid-eighteenth century and beyond, Imagining Bharat illuminates how the supple conception of Bharat formed a prism through which many Indian authors—writing in various languages within and outside of the colonial state—reconfigured pivotal events in the distant and proximate past for specific political purposes. As these writers balanced of number of seemingly incompatible aims in their fictions (i.e., rallying Hindus while also buttressing British colonialism), the result was a multigeneric literary text that was often at once historical romance, epic, myth, and political tract—a significant stage in the development of the modern Indian novel that remains largely overlooked. The authors I examine include Bankim Chattopadhyay, Kali Kumar Sinha, Sarath Kumar Ghosh, Siddha Mohana Mitra, Rabindranath Tagore, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.