CURRENT EMPLOYMENT
2024-present, Sr. Assistant Director, Graduate Student Career Pathways, Office of Career Exploration and Success, Rutgers University.
2023-present, Managing Editor, Modernism/modernity, Johns Hopkins University Press.
EDUCATION
2024, PhD, Program in Comparative Literature with a Graduate Certificate in Cinema Studies, Rutgers University.
Dissertation: “The Spectral Urban: Visualizing the Indian Metropolis”
2016, MPhil, Department of English, Jadavpur University.
Dissertation: “Crowdsourcing the Partition: Memory as Archive and Archive as Memory”
2014 and 2012, MA and BA (Hons), Department of English, Jadavpur University.
AWARDS, GRANTS, AND FELLOWSHIPS
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.
SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS
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] 2025. “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 Deshmukh. 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] 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 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] 2025, 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] 2025. “নিউ ইয়র্কের সেকেন্ড-হ্যান্ড বুকস্টোর: সাহিত্যিক ধনসম্পদের সমৃদ্ধ ইতিহাস.” 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.
INVITED LECTURES AND TALKS
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.
CONFERENCES, ROUNDTABLES, AND SEMINAR PRESENTATIONS (SELECTED)
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, 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, Virtual.
2021. “On Homelessness and the Afterlives of Homes.” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Virtual.
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, Virtual.
2020. “Bollywood’s Regional Turn: Investigating Hindi Cinema’s Shift to Non-urbanity.” Association of Asian Studies in Asia Conference, Virtual.
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, Virtual.
2020. “How to Map the Textual City in the Global South.” World Literatures Symposium, Virtual.
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. Chair and organizer of the seminar “Linguistic Nationalisms: Far-Right Politics and Global South Epistemologies” American Comparative Literature Association Conference.
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, Virtual.
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, Virtual.
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 (with Penny Yeung) and organizer of “Love in Translation”, the biennial graduate student conference of Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature.
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
[FORTHCOMING] 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 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.
UNIVERSITY TEACHING
Undergraduate Courses, Instructor of Record
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.
Undergraduate Courses, 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
Undergraduate Courses, Guest Lecturer
Spring 2025 - Global Science Fiction (Comparative Literature), Rutgers University.
Fall 2023 - Bollywood (Cinema Studies/African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and 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.
ROLES IN ACADEMIC ADMINISTRATION
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.
ROLES IN EDITING AND PUBLISHING
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.
RESEARCH AND EARLY 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).
OTHER ROLES
2022, 2018, 2017, Projectionist, Cinema Studies Program, Rutgers University.
2018-2021, Writing Tutor, Rutgers University.
2021, 2019, 2018, Grader, Cinema Studies Program and Department of German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures, Rutgers University.
MENTORSHIP
2025-present, 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.
SERVICE
2025 - present, Reviewer for Cogent Arts & Humanities.
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, Volunteer Reviewer, Graduate Handbook Revisions Committee. Program in Comparative Literature. Rutgers University.
PROFESSIONAL WORKSHOPS, AND CERTIFICATES (SELECTED)
2024, Leading for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education, University of Michigan.
2022, LA Review of Books Publishing Workshop.
2020-21, Pre-Doctoral Leadership Academy, Rutgers Center for Organizational Leadership.
2018, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.
2017, Institute of World Literature (Harvard), University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
2012 - 13, Post-Graduate Certificate in ‘Editing and Publishing’, School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University.
WORK IN OTHER MEDIA
2020, Editor/Co-host/Writer, Jolly Good Bollywood podcast.
2020, Editor/Co-host/Writer, “Ghore Pherar Gaan” show, Radio Quarantine Kolkata.
LANGUAGES
Bengali (native), English and Hindi (full proficiency), German and French (reading proficiency).
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
2022 - present, Education Advocate, Behind the Book.
2022 - present, Translator, Translators without Borders.
2012 - 2014, Volunteer Teacher, Make a Difference.