I moved to Shiv Nadar University in January 2015 from the University of Delhi where I was Professor and Head , Deplartment of English, University of Delhi. My research interests include : the language of radicalism and its relationship with the nineteenth-century British novel; the making of an urban aesthetic in the 19th century English novel; the cultural fall out of the Anatomy Act and the New Poor Law ; contagion, borders and border crossings; visualizing Calcutta in the 19th century; the early novel in India. I have published on these topics in journals like Representations, Victorian Studies, English Literary History, Literature Compass and Nineteenth-Century Literature

My current research is concerned with the ways in which the body was grasped and deployed in Victorian culture. I focus, the one hand, on the body in all its materiality, as something that laboured, consumed and needed to be protected from diseases but could, at the same time, be made to yield medical knowledge. On the other hand, I look at it as something that could work with posture, gesture, accessories to project a dematerialised, but powerful force field, that unfolded outside its physical boundaries. I am also currently co-editing a volume entitled Novel Formations on the early novel in India.

I am very interested in supervising PhD students interested in working on any topic related to nineteenth-century novel in Britain; novel theory; the novel and visual culture; the novel and popular forms; the human and cultural implications of medicine especially in the 19th century; contemporary fiction especially the novels Garcia Marquez and Jose Saramago.