I work on writing from Britain, the Caribbean, and South Asia from 1800 onwards. A lot of my work has been about Caribbean literature and ideas in the second half of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on Indian Caribbean writing. More recently I've been working on writing from Northern India. I'm interested in questions about language and style: what it means to write in English in the subcontinent, the varieties of English that are used in this context, and how they relate to other subcontinental languages.
I'm interested in socio- and historical linguistics, and my work starts from a pragmatic view of written texts: Why were they written? To whom are they addressed? Asking what a text does (in a given social world, or to me, now, reading it) has always seemed to me a more helpful starting point than asking, in the abstract, what it is about or what it means.
Above all, I'm interested in how modern literature has tried to take on some of the roles of religion -- to offer a site of "transcendence", "tradition", "immortality" and irreducable value -- and how, as a social concept, institutional practice, and corpus of materials, it has failed. Some of my favourite works, Eliot's Middlemarch; Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas; Amit Chaudhuri's The Immortals, mark the limits and limitations of this endeavour. Others, divested of these heavy ambitions, seem to model different, more nourishing functions for literary art: consolation, lament, reverie, contemplation. To be a site, more modestly, in which heart speaks to heart, in Newman's phrase.
Writers who have been particularly important to me, aside from those already mentioned, include Penelope Fitzgerald, Denis Johnson, Giorgio Bassani, Jibanananda Das, and Joy Williams.
Recent publications include:
'Penelope Fitzgerald and Edward Burne-Jones: The spirit of her work' Cambridge Quarterly 52.1 (March 2023).
V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought (OUP, 2020).
'Glimpses of a Totally Different System' Granta Online Edition 28th November 2019.
At Christ Church I teach the core "Introduction to Literature" and "Introduction to Language" papers for first years. With Anna Nickerson, I teach Prelims Papers 3 (Literatures in English 1830-1910) and 4 (Literatures in English 1910-Present), and FHS Paper 5 (Literatures in English 1760-1830). For the faculty I lecture, supervise FHS dissertations, and convene Paper 6 Special Options in areas related to my research interests (most recently "Nervous Conditions: Literature and Psychology after Empire"). I give lecture series on "Analysing Prose and Narrative" and "Anglophone Caribbean Literatures After 1960" and contribute to lecturing for Prelims 4 and the Introduction to Language course. I currently convene the MSt in World Literatures in English with Malachi McIntosh, teaching a suite of seminars for the core A- and B-Courses and supervising dissertation work.