RESEARCH INTERESTS
Modern and contemporary South Asian literature; cinema and media studies; graphic narratives and visual cultures; urban humanities; memory and archive studies; translation; postcolonial studies; transnational modernisms
EDUCATION
2024, PhD, Comparative Literature, Rutgers University.
Graduate Certificate in Cinema Studies
Dissertation: The Spectral Urban: Visualizing the Indian Metropolis
2016. MPhil, English, Jadavpur University.
Dissertation: Crowdsourcing the Partition: Memory as Archive and Archive as Memory
2014. MA, English, Jadavpur University.
2012. BA (Hons), English, Jadavpur University.
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
Managing Editor, Modernism/modernity, 2023–
Manage editorial operations for the flagship journal of the Modernist Studies Association, coordinating peer review, production, and strategic editorial initiatives.
Assistant Director, Career Education, University of Toronto, 2026–
Lead university-wide career education initiatives and curricular programming supporting student success and experiential learning.
Senior Assistant Director, Graduate Student Career Pathways, Rutgers University, 2024–2026
Designed and launched institution-wide graduate career development and mentorship programs across master's and doctoral education.
PUBLICATIONS
Book Manuscript in Progress
The Spectral Urban: Visualizing the Indian Metropolis
Drawing on literature, cinema, graphic narrative, and visual culture, this project examines how post-liberalization Indian cities are imagined, contested, and remembered through cultural production. It traces urban transformations across Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and other metropolitan sites to argue that contemporary Indian urbanism is structured through overlapping regimes of memory, spectrality, and circulation.
Book Chapters
[FORTHCOMING] 2026. “Streaming the Supernatural: The Platformization of Bengali Fear.” Platform South Asia. Ed. Sangita Goptal and Meheli Sen. South Asian Screen Cultures Series. Series Editors: Sangita Gopal and Rohit Dasgupta. Bloomsbury Academic.
[FORTHCOMING] 2026. “Street haunting, haunting streets: The Cities of Virginia Woolf and Jibanananda Das.” Virginia Woolf and Transnationalism. Ed. Shinjini Chattopadhyay. Virginia Woolf: Variations Series. Series Editor: Derek Ryan. Edinburgh University Press.
2023. “Voices of resistance: Exploring Feminine Futurities in Indian Graphic Narratives.” The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures. Ed. Anjali Nerlekar and Ulka Anjaria. OUP.
Winner of René Wellek Prize 2025 for Edited Collection.
2023. “‘The Surgical Strike that Shook the Mughal Empire’: Evacuation and Distortion of Histories in Contemporary Hindi Screen Cultures.” Historicizing Myths in Contemporary India: Cinematic Representations and Nationalist Agendas in Hindi Cinema. Eds. Swapna Gopinath and Rutuja Desmukh. Routledge.
2020. “Modernism in South Asia.” Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology. Eds. Alys Moody and Stephen Ross.Bloomsbury Academic.
Winner of the Modernist Studies Association Prize 2021 for Editions, Anthologies, or Collections.
2016. “Teaching Shakespeare in Bengal” in Shakespeare in India: Criticism, Translation and Performance. Ed.
Debayan Deb Barman.
Refereed Journal Articles
[FORTHCOMING] 2027. “‘World Class’ Promises, Abandoned Lives: Vernacular Urban Becoming in the Globalizing Indian Urban.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
[FORTHCOMING] 2026. “Angry Young Man 2.0: From Zanjeer to Jawaan.” South Asian Popular Culture.
2023. “‘My father’s village, my city': Place-making in the cinema of NCR.” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies. Special issue on “Representing Urban Change.”
2022. “Paratext City as Text: New Strategies in Reading (and Mapping) Sarnath Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
2017. “Finding Oneself On Board the Ibis in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.” Women’s Studies Quarterly. Special Issue on “At Sea.” Vol. 45, No. 1-2.
2016. “The Cyborg Prophecy: Reading between Asimov’s Lines.” Mejo: The MELOW Journal of World Literature.
Reprinted as a chapter in the book Literature, Society and Politics: Selected Essays (2017). Eds. Manju Jaidka and Manpreet Kang.
2015. “The 'Woman' of the Crowd: Exploring Female Flânerie.” The Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities.
2015. “The Body of the Condemned: Examining Gender Violence during the Partition in Manto’s Works.” Contemporary Literary Review India. Vol. 2, No. 3.
Book Reviews
[FORTHCOMING] 2026.Review of Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, Cosmo-Modernism and Theater in India: Writing and Staging Multilingual Modernisms. New York: Columbia University Press, 2025, in South Asian Review.
2025. Review of Sarah Jilani. Subjectivity and Decolonization in the Post-Independence Novel and Film. Edinburgh: EUP, 2024, in South Asian Review.
Edited Volumes
2017-19, Editor of “South Asian Modernism” section in Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology (2020). Eds. Alys Moody and Stephen Ross. Bloomsbury Academic
Special Issues
[FORTHCOMING] 2026, Co-editor, Special Issue on “SRK 2.0: The Comeback”, South Asian Popular Culture Journal, Routledge.
Translations
2023.“No one incomplete is ever whole” (“Koi adhoora poora nahi hota”) and “My own aloneness” (“Apne akele hone ko”) by Vinod Kumar Shukla, in DoubleSpeak Magazine.
2022. “Home” (“Ghar”) Poems by Agyeya, in DoubleSpeak Magazine.
2020. “Introduction to New Story” (“Nayi Kahaani ki Bhumika”) by Kamleshwar, in Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology. Bloomsbury Academic. Co-translated with Arshdeep Singh Brar.
Public-Facing Writing
[FORTHCOMING] 2026. “নিউ ইয়র্কের সেকেন্ড-হ্যান্ড বুকস্টোর: সাহিত্যিক ধনসম্পদের সমৃদ্ধ ইতিহাস.” বোধশব্দ পত্রিকা. বিষয়: ‘সেকেন্ডহ্যান্ড বই’”. Bodhshabdo Magazine.
2020. “After Amphan: As iconic College Street goes under, Kolkata mourns a way of life.” TheWire.in.
2020. “‘Main yahaan, tu wahaan’: Revisiting early ‘00s Bachchan Films during the pandemic.” Filmcompanion.in.
2015. “Remembering Jasodhara-di (17th August, 1937 - 9th January, 2015).” The Confidential Clerk. Volume 1.
SELECTED AWARDS, GRANTS, AND FELLOWSHIPS
2026, Building Rutgers Initiatives for Development and Graduate Engagement (BRIDGE) Award.
2025, Rutgers Institute for Teaching, Innovation, and Inclusive Pedagogy Teaching Recognition.
2024, Outstanding Doctoral Student Award, Rutgers University
2024, Global Asias Interdisciplinary Pedagogy Grant, Rutgers University
2021-22 Rutgers Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship
2021-22, University and Louis Bevier Fellowship (declined)
2020-21, Rutgers Excellence Fellowship
2020-21, Pre-Doctoral Leadership Academy Fellowship, Rutgers Center for Organizational Leadership
2020, School of Graduate Studies Emergency Research Funding Award
2020, Association of Asian Studies International Exchange Grant Program (Declined; attended remotely)
2020, Comparative Literature Summer Session Dissertation Award
2019, Chakra Award for Best Graduate Paper
2018, Off-Campus Dissertation Development Award
2018, Cinema Studies Small Grants Award
2018, South Asia Studies Research and Travel Award
2017, 2018. Rutgers Conference Travel Award
2017-18, Digital Humanities Seed Grant
2017, Rutgers Graduate Essay Award in Cinema Studies
2016 - 18, Rutgers Excellence Fellowship
2014-15, Jadavpur University Department of English Center for Advanced Study Fellowship.
SELECTED INVITED TALKS
2026. “Historical Epics, Fascist Aesthetics, and the Politics of the Past in Bollywood.” Cinema Studies, Rutgers University.
2025. “The Language Challenge,” Rutgers University.
2025. “Multilingual Modernisms in South Asia”, Bard College Berlin.
2024. “Modernism in India,” Bard College Berlin.
2023. “Shakespeare in India: The Bard as a Bollywood Screenwriter,” Translation Studies Initiative, Rutgers University.
2018. “Paratext City as Text: New Strategies in Reading (and Mapping),” Print and Visuality Conference, New York University.
2015. “Teaching Shakespeaere in Bengal” at the UGC National Seminar on Shakespeare in India: Criticism, Translation, Performance’ to be held at THLH Mahavidyalaya Birbhum, in collaboration with the Visva-Bharati University, Shantiniketan.
2015. “Crowdsourcing our memories: Talking about Archives and Digital Humanities in the context of the Partition” at Research at Work Conference, at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad.
SELECTED CONFERENCES, ROUNDTABLES, AND SEMINAR PRESENTATIONS
[FORTHCOMING] 2026. “Unmapping the City: Itinerancy, Opacity, and the Politics of Circulation in Contemporary Delhi Cinema,” Annual Conference of South Asia, Madison.
2026. “Recycling the Nation: State Iconography and Counter-Histories in South Asian Comics.” Canadian Society for the Study of Comics Annual Conference, Toronto.
2025. “Writing in The Common Woman: Gender in the Postmillennial Indian Graphic Narratives,” European Conference on South Asian Studies, Heidelberg.
2025. “Culinary Geographies: Domestic Labor as Embodied Practice in Contemporary Hindi Films,” Annual Conference of South Asia, Madison.
2025. “The Disappearing Act: Women in Bombay Cinema.” Association of Asian Studies in Asia Conference, Kathmandu.
2024. “Reflections in Genre and Method: The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures.” Roundtable at Association of Asian Studies in Asia Conference, Yogyakarta.
2024. “‘Jee Karda Dila Du Tainu Burj Khalifa’: The Rise of the Non-Human Technopolis in Hindi Cinema.” Association of Asian Studies in Asia Conference, Yogyakarta.
2023. “Street Art: Immediate Image, Long History,” Modernist Studies Association, Brooklyn.
2023. “Of Purity Camps and Skydomes: Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, Indian Nationalism, and Dystopian City Planning.” Modern Language Association Annual Conference, San Francisco.
2022. “Voices of resistance: Exploring Feminist Futurities in Indian Graphic Narratives” Annual Conference of South Asia, Madison.
2022. “Restoring/Restorying: Towards a New Theory of the Postmemory of the Partition.” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Baltimore.
2022. “Examining the Representation of the 2020 Indian Migrant Labor Crisis in Vishanu.” PhD Symposium on Fragile Lives. Ca’Foscari University of Venice,
2021. “Exploring Post-91 ‘New India’: Images in Uday Prakash’s ‘Paul Gomra and his Bajaj’.” Annual Conference of South Asia, Madison.
2021. “‘My Father’s Village, My City': Studying a Hindi Cinema Caught Between the Urban and the Non-urban.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference.
2021. “On Homelessness and the Afterlives of Homes.” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Conference.
2021. “City as Spectral Archive: Reading Delhi in Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor and Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm.” ‘Phantasmic Binds: Culture as Poltergeist’, the Biennial Graduate Student Conference of Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature.
2020. “Bollywood’s Regional Turn: Investigating Hindi Cinema’s Shift to Non-urbanity.” Association of Asian Studies in Asia Conference.
2020. ““The Surgical Strike that shook the Mughal Empire”: Evacuation and Distortion of Histories in Contemporary Hindi Screen Cultures.” University of Glasgow Arts Postgraduate Conference.
2020. “How to Map the Textual City in the Global South.” World Literatures Symposium.
2020. “The Bard as a Bollywood Screenwriter: Exploring the ‘Other’ in Romeo and Juliet.”Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Boston.
2020. “Exploring the Ruinous Capital in Delhi Graphic Novels.’” University of Ottawa Department of English Graduate Conference, Ottawa.
2020. “‘Some things get lost': Tracking a Premodern City in Postmodern Times in Masaan.” Yale Modern South Asia Workshop, New Haven.
2018. “Rethinking the Notion of the Non-Place in Contemporary Hindi Cinema.” Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison.
2017. “Finding Oneself Onboard the Ibis in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Baltimore.
2015. “‘With every experience, we are reborn’: Immigrant Women in Chandani Lokuge’s If The Moon Smiled.” Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, Toronto.
CONFERENCES, SEMINARS, AND PANELS ORGANIZED OR CHAIRED
[FORTHCOMING] 2026. Co-chair and co-organizer of the panel “Shifting Grounds: Borderscapes, Opacity, and Relational Belonging in South Asia” at the Annual Conference of South Asia.
2025. Chair and organizer of the panel “Embodied Spatialities: Gender, Caste, Labor and the Archive in South Asian Cultural Imaginaries” at the Annual Conference of South Asia.
2023. Organizer of lecture on “Queer History in India: A brief History” by Dr. Ulka Anjaria (Brandeis) at Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures, Rutgers University.
2022. Organizer of a day-long event on Graphic Novels in South Asia as a part of the AMESALL Comicon, Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures, Rutgers University.
2022. Chair of the panel “Gendering Nations (And Their Discontents)” at the Annual Conference of South Asia.
2022. Chair and organizer of the panel “The City and its Margins: New Perspective on the Urban” at the Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Conference.
2021. Chair of the panel “Exploring the Intersection of History and Literature” at the Annual Conference on South Asia.
2021. Co-organizer of seminar (with Chiara Degli-Esposti) on “The Urban Question”, Center for Critical Analysis, Rutgers University.
2020. Co-organizer of virtual roundtable on “Spatial Practices, Black Activism, and the City” as a part of the Urban Humanities Working Group, Center for Critical Analysis, Rutgers University.
2020. Organizer and chair of panel “Bollywood’s Regional Turn: Investigating Hindi Cinema’s Shift to Non-urbanity” at Association of Asian Studies in Asia. Kobe.
2018. Chair of panel for “Shock,” the annual graduate conference of Department of Germanic, Russian, and Eastern European Languages and Literatures, Rutgers University.
2018. Co-chair and organizer of “Love in Translation”, the biennial graduate student conference of Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature.
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
2025. Discussant and moderator for a conversation with Suman Mukhopadhyay after screening of his film Putulnacher Itikatha. Rutgers University.
2024. Discussant for Dr. Moinak Biswas’s talk on “Vision of a Land,” Rutgers University.
2024. Discussant and moderator for a conversation with Shaunak Sen after a screening of his award-winning documentary, All That Breathes, Rutgers University.
2024. Moderator for panel on “Publishing” at the Beyond Academia Conference.
2024. Invited Speaker, Graduate Students Signature Career Event, Rutgers University.
2015. “Collecting Oral Narratives About The Partition" organized by PeaceWorks, a project of the Seagull Foundation of Arts.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
As Instructor of Record
Spring 2026 - Rutgers Internship and Co-op Course (RICC), Career Exploration and Success, Rutgers University.
Fall 2023 - Women Writers of South Asia (African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literature/Comparative Literature/Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies), Rutgers University.
Fall 2023 - Comparative Literature Senior Capstone Seminar, Program in Comparative Literature, Rutgers University.
Summer 2023 - Comics in South Asia (African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures), Rutgers University.
Spring 2023 - Introduction to Literatures of South Asia (Comparative Literature/African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures), Rutgers University.
Spring 2023 - Women Writers of South Asia (African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literature/Comparative Literature/Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies), Rutgers University. Fall 2022 - Modern Literatures of South Asia (Comparative Literature/African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures), Rutgers University.
Spring 2020 - Film and Literature in South Asia (Cinema Studies/African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures/Comparative Literature), Rutgers University.
Fall 2019 - Women Writers of South Asia (African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literature/Comparative Literature/Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies), Rutgers University.
As Teaching Assistant
Fall 2022 - Banned Books (Comparative Literature/African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literature), Rutgers University.
Spring 2019 - Literature Across Borders (Comparative Literature), Rutgers University
Fall 2019 - Being Human (Comparative Literature), Rutgers University
As Guest Lecturer
Spring 2026, Fall 2023 - Bollywood (Cinema Studies/African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literature), Rutgers University.
Spring 2025 - Global Science Fiction (Comparative Literature), Rutgers University
Fall 2021, 2020 - Modern Literatures in South Asia (African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literature), Rutgers University
Spring 2020 - Literature Across Borders (Comparative Literature), Rutgers University.
Spring 2019 - Global Horror (Cinema Studies), Rutgers University.
Spring 2018 - Cinemas of Asia and Africa (Cinema Studies/African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literature), Rutgers University.
Fall 2017 - Women Writers of South Asia (African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures/ Comparative Literature), Rutgers University.
Fall 2015, Spring 2016 - English as a Second Language (English), Jadavpur University.
Fall 2015 - Literature and Music (English), Jadavpur University.
SERVICE
2024 - present, Reviewer for South Asian Popular Culture.
2024 - present, Reviewer for Journal of Cultural Research.
2022 - present, Reviewer for Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
2018 - 2022, Graduate co-ordinator of the Urban Humanities Research sponsored by the Center for Critical Analysis, Rutgers University.
2020, Reviewer, Graduate Handbook Revisions Committee. Program in Comparative Literature. Rutgers University.
MENTORSHIP
2025-2026, Staff Mentor, Graduate Consulting Club, Rutgers University.
2023 - 2024, Faculty Mentor, RUBollywood, Rutgers University.
2023 - 2024, Faculty Mentor, Rutgers Hindu-Urdu Language and Culture Association.
2019, 2020, Leader at International Teaching Assistant Orientations, Rutgers TA Project.
2018-2019, Graduate Mentor Fellow, Rutgers Honors College.
SELECTED PROFESSIONAL WORKSHOPS, AND CERTIFICATES
2024, Leading for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education, University of Michigan.
2018, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.
2017, Institute of World Literature (Harvard), University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
LANGUAGES
Bengali (native), English and Hindi (full proficiency), German and French (reading proficiency).
ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP
2022-2024 Graduate Coordinator (Doctoral Students), Office of Career Exploration and Success, Rutgers University.
2022-2023, Graduate Coordinator, Year of Languages Project, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University.
2021-2022, Graduate Coordinator, Translation Studies Initiative, Rutgers University.
EDITING AND PUBLISHING EXPERIENCE
2023-present, Freelance Developmental Editor.
2022, Copy Editor for PubLab Journal, the annual journal of the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop.
2018-2019, Co-editor of Comp Lit: The Magazine, online journal of the Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature.
2015-16, Editor, The Confident Clerk, Center for Victorian Studies, Jadavpur University.
EARLY RESEARCH ROLES
2015-16, Project Fellow at Ebong Alap, Kolkata, a non-profit organization working in gender and education sectors.
2014-15, Oral History Apprentice, 1947 Partition Archive.
2014, Research Assistant to the Dr Jasodhara Bagchi (professor emeritus, Department of English and Center for Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University).
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
2022 - present, Translator, Translators without Borders.
2022 - 2026, Education Advocate, Behind the Book.
2012 - 2014, Volunteer Teacher, Make a Difference.