I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English Literature at Northumbria University and Editor of the Journal of War and Culture Studies. Previously, I was a Wellcome ISSF Fellow at the School of English, University of Leeds and a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW), Wolfson College, University of Oxford. I sit on the Editorial Board of the First World War Studies journal. My first monograph, Health Policy and Racial Capitalism in British Detention Centres is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2025.

My research interests are First World War, life-writing, twentieth century (Anglophone and Bengali) literature, colonialism and postcolonialism, feminist theory, and Medical Humanities. I have published widely in each of these areas. I completed my PhD in English Literature from the University of Sheffield (UK) in 2018. At Sheffield, I was the Vice-Chancellor’s scholar and my PhD was entitled ‘Nursing Politics and the Body in First World World War Life-Writing’. I stayed back in Sheffield for another year to take up the role of Postdoctoral Research Associate in the AHRC-funded project ‘Literature, Psychoanalysis and the Death Penalty 1900–1950’. My Fellowship project at Leeds (RG.ENGL.111723.034) was entitled ‘Wounds for the King-Emperor: Race and Malaise in the Medical Treatment of the Wounded Indian Soldier during the First World War’. Over the course of my tenure at OCLW, I have been completing my first monograph, now under review with a major University Press.

I am an internationally leading Early Career Researcher in my field. Between 2013 and 2021, I was awarded £310,139 in research funding, as PI of major research grants from the Leverhulme and Wellcome Trusts but also as grants from organisations like the United Nations, CARA (Council for At-Risk Academics), and several universities around the world. I have delivered invited lectures in 9 universities across 6 countries in 3 continents (Durham University, King’s College London, University of Leeds, University of Manchester, University of Newcastle NSW, University of Regensburg, Sorbonne Université, Thammasat University, Vrije University Brussels). I was invited to deliver the inaugural Dennis Showalter Memorial lecture hosted at Northumbria in March 2022, and it was live-screened as well as uploaded on YouTube. My research on caste-based divisions in the colonial Indian army garnered significant coverage in The Independent in the context of the 2022 protests in India following military reform. My teaching interests align closely with my research, and I am also a Fellow of Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Prior to starting my PhD in English Literature, I taught German at Calcutta, and was twice the Goethe Stipendiatin (Goethe scholar, fully funded by the Goethe Institut) to Berlin and Hamburg, where I completed advanced levels (C1 and C2) of German. I can confidently carry out research in English, Bengali, German, Hindi, and Nepali, and some of my publication outputs are based on archival documents written in Bengali and German, that I found during my archival research in Calcutta and Berlin.

I am also a trained Rabindrasangeet singer, having trained in Tagore’s music for over twenty years and having obtained all my singing exam certificates from Bangiya Sangeet Parishad. Tagore’s music still remains a passionate hobby of mine although I do not perform in public anymore. I also undertook some training in Hindustani classical music (vocal) over a number of years, but my greatest musical ambition is to learn playing a stringed classical instrument like the sarod or sarangi. I play the harmonium, and despite coming very close to learning how to play the tanpura, I have not succeeded so far.

I grew up in Siliguri and Calcutta in India, and now live near the coast in North East England with my husband.

All photographs in this website, unless otherwise specified, are taken by me. The images are licensed from Adobe Stock.