I was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and St John’s College, Cambridge where I was also a Junior Research Fellow. After a decade of teaching in the University of London, first at Queen Mary and then at King’s College, I came to Oxford in 2019.
Research Interests
I work on twentieth-century literature and culture. While I have written on several modernist figures, much of my work is situated at the intersection of archival, visual and literary cultures in the context of war and, more recently, the sea. Other areas of interest include the literature of twentieth-century conflicts and life-writing; British modernism; colonial and postcolonial writings; body, sexuality and the history of emotions; close reading and literary form.
For several years now, I have been working on The Oxford Book of First World War Empire Writing. It brings together a range of material – testimonial, journalistic, humanitarian, political, and literary – from archives and libraries from across South Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, parts of Africa, and the West Indies. As a companion volume, I am completing a book of essays on twentieth-century war literature for Cambridge University Press. I am also in the early stages of writing a book on the experience and imaginings of sea-voyages from the nineteenth century to the present. Along with Maria DiBattista, I am co-editing the final volume of The Cambridge History of Literary London, 1914 to the Present.
My first monograph Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2006) used literature to understand war culture with a focus on the sense of touch, the meanings it carries in times of crisis, and its relationship to processes of representation; it was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2009. My subsequent work has focussed on the colonial and transnational aspects of the conflict and includes the following edited volumes – Race, Empire and First World War Writing (CUP, 2012), the photographic sourcebook Indians on the Western Front (Gallimard, 2014), The Cambridge Companion to First World War Poetry (2014), First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity (British Academy/OUP, 2018, with Kate McLoughlin) and Colonial Encounters in the time of Global Conflict (Routledge, 2021, with Anna Maguire and Daniel Steinbach). I have also published in journals such as Modernism/Modernity, Essays in Criticism, The American Historical Review, Textual Practice and Sculpture Journal.
My second monograph India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images and Songs (Cambridge, 2018), funded by the British Academy, argued for an expanded understanding of the ‘war archive’ by recovering a range of material – trench artefacts, photographs, POW voice-recordings, censored letters, ethnological drawings and folk songs – from private and public collections from across South Asia, Europe, Britain, Australia and NZ and reading them alongside testimonial, literary and political writings (for discussion and reviews, see here and here). It obtained the Hindu Non-Fiction Award in India, the Ananda Coomaraswamy Award by the Association of Asian Studies in the US, and the biennial European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) Book Prize in 2020.
Between 2013 and 2016, I directed a major collaborative research project on ‘Cultural Exchange in the time of Global Conflict’ funded by the Humanities in European Research Area (HERA). Involving academic institutions, museums and art-houses across Europe, it brought together academics, museologists, archivists and artists, and resulted in several books, an exhibition, a concert, and a short documentary by the AHRC.
With Professor Peter Boxall and Dr Elena Violaris, I convene the Modern and Contemporary Literature Research seminars at All Souls.
I am one of the editors of The Cambridge Quarterly and a member of the editorial boards of Oxford English Monographs, Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies and The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945.
I have occasionally written for the Guardian and was one of the advisors to the BBC for their centennial commemoration of the First World War. I presented the Radio 4 series on ‘Soldiers of Empire’ and served as the commentator for several television and radio programmes. Some of my recent work has appeared on the Expedition platform.
In 2021, I was elected to the United Service Institution of India as an Extraordinary Fellow and, in 2022, to the Royal Historical Society. I serve on committees at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the Imperial War Museum, London, Mission Patrimoine 1914-1918 (France) and at the National WW1 Museum and Memorial (USA).
