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 broader research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and theory, theory of the novel, and British imperial philosophies and literatures of empire. My articles and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 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. Before USNA, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Mississippi.

My forthcoming book, Imagining Bharat: Colonialism, Nationalism, and the Politics of Form in the Indian Novel, 1880-1920, offers the first comprehensive account of how the early Indian novel naturalized the emerging understanding of the country as a primordial Hindu homeland. Appropriated from Hindu religious texts in the mid-nineteenth century, the term “Bharat” was foremost of these identifiers and was even proclaimed in the Indian Constitution (1950) to be the genuine name of the country in a crucial appositive phrase: “India, that is, Bharat.” The bedrock idea of India an originary Hindu homeland endures in a particularly restrictive and exclusionary form in the twenty-first century, invigorating Hindu nationalist movements in recent years and challenging the Indian republic’s avowed commitment to secularism.

But as Imagining Bharat shows, the potent cultural imagining of India as essentially Hindu was in fact expressed in expansive and inclusive ways 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, this book illuminates how the supple conception of India-as-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. Imagining Bharat brings together both English-language and Bengali novels by authors including Bankim Chattopadhyay, Kali Kumar Sinha, Sarath Kumar Ghosh, Siddha Mohana Mitra, and Rabindranath Tagore. Imagining Bharat has been issued an advance contract by the University of Virginia Press and will be included in its Cultural Frames, Framing Cultures Series in 2026/2027.