Victorian Literature · Mobility Studies · Crime Fiction · Postcolonial Studies
Maitrayee Roychoudhury
Victorian literature, gender, and the mobile lives of women across the nineteenth-century world
Assistant Professor at ARSD College, University of Delhi, with a PhD submitted at the University of St Andrews. My research spans Victorian popular fiction, crime and detective writing, mobility studies, and postcolonial approaches to nineteenth-century culture — asking how women moved through the physical and literary landscapes of modernity, and how those movements were represented, celebrated, and policed.
A scholar of the nineteenth-century mobile world
I study the literature of the nineteenth century as a world in motion. My doctoral research, From Brighton to Bombay: Mobility and the Nineteenth-Century Female Detective, is the first study to historicise the female detective subgenre in relation to the technologies and experiences of travel from which it arose, reading British, Australian, and Bengali fiction alongside one another.
Across teaching and research, I return to a single set of questions: how did women move through the physical and literary landscapes of modernity, and how did print culture — from the London railway bookstall to Calcutta’s Battala presses — carry their stories across languages and empires?
Research Interests
Bridging Victorian studies, mobility research, and decolonial approaches to literary history
Victorian Literature & Popular Fiction
Sensation fiction, detective casebooks, and New Woman narratives — from Wilkie Collins’s disordered domestic spaces to Grant Allen’s mobile heroines.
Crime Fiction & Detection
The history of detective fiction, with particular attention to female detectives across British, Australian, and Bengali traditions from the 1860s to the early twentieth century.
Mobility & Transport Studies
How railways, steamships, omnibuses, and bicycles reshaped literary form, female agency, and the circulation of texts across the British Empire and beyond.
Postcolonial & Decolonial Studies
Decentring Victorian studies through transnational perspectives — from Bengali Battala publishing to vernacular Victorianisms and colonial print networks.
Gender Studies & the New Woman
Female professional identities, the New Woman across British and Bengali traditions, and the intersections of gender, caste, and class in women’s mobility.
Print Culture & Periodicals
Battala publishing, graphic satire, serialisation, and the transnational circulation of popular fiction — from Calcutta’s vernacular presses to the Tagore family’s Bharati.
PhD Research · University of St Andrews
From Brighton to Bombay
My PhD thesis, submitted at the University of St Andrews and funded by the AHRC through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, is the first study to historicise the female detective subgenre in relation to the technologies and experiences of travel from which it arose. Spanning 1863–1910, it examines thirteen primary texts from Britain, Australia, and India — nine English-language works and four Bengali novels and serials.
Read more about this projectEarlier Research
Disordered spaces in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, feminist historiography in H.D.’s Palimpsest, and subversion in Victorian fairy tales and children’s literature.
Postcolonial Work
Ama Ata Aidoo’s radical women-scapes, Bengali print culture, and decolonial approaches to the nineteenth-century literary field.
MPhil Thesis
“Dissent in Victorian and Edwardian Fantasies by Women” — examining how women writers used fantasy as a vehicle for subversion.
Recent Activity
Selected talks, publications, and media appearances
The Lost Detectives Podcast
Episode 7: In Conversation with Maitrayee Roychoudhury
A wide-ranging discussion with Claire Whitehead on Victorian female detectives, Bengali crime fiction, mobility and colonial print cultures, and the New Woman detective in nineteenth-century India.
More on media & pressSGSAH Featured Researcher
April 2025
Selected as the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities Featured Researcher, spotlighting the PhD project on mobility and the nineteenth-century female detective.
View profileThe Moving Gaze and its Captured Subjects
Victorian Popular Fiction Association, July 2024
The Victorian female detective in the colonies — examining how imperial mobility networks shaped the figure of the female sleuth beyond metropolitan Britain.
Empire’s Dry Bones: Fergus Hume’s Gypsy Detective
Cross Cultural Circa Nineteenth Century, May 2024
Reading Hume’s itinerant detective figure through the lens of Romani mobility, racialisation, and colonial networks.
Affiliations
Current institutional affiliations and memberships
University of St Andrews
PhD, School of English
AHRC-SGSAH Funded · 2022–2026
ARSD College, University of Delhi
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Permanent · 2015–present
Get in touch
Whether you would like to discuss a collaboration, invite me to speak, or ask about my work on Victorian literature and mobility studies, I would be glad to hear from you.