Victorian Literature · Mobility Studies · Crime Fiction · Postcolonial Studies
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 from the University of St Andrews (2026). 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.
In brief
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?
Contents
Bridging Victorian studies, mobility research, and decolonial approaches to literary history
Doctoral Research · PhD, University of St Andrews, 2026
Mobility and the Nineteenth-Century Female Detective
My doctoral thesis, for which I was awarded a PhD by the University of St Andrews in June 2026, was funded by the AHRC through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. It 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.
Latest
Selected talks, publications, and media appearances
Podcast · Host
An Empires Collective podcast · Episode 1, 16 September 2026
I host Empire Sleuths, a podcast on detectives, crime fiction, and the mobile lives of women across the nineteenth-century world. The first episode, with Vaibhav Parel (Newcastle University), discusses diasporic crime fiction and questions of empire and nationality.
Listen to the episodeJournal Article · In press
Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, vol. 8, no. 2, Autumn 2026
Forthcoming alongside a chapter on Hume’s Hagar of the Pawnshop in Close Reading the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2026).
All publicationsConference Paper
Collaborations, c19c annual conference, University of St Andrews, April 2026
A paper on Archēglyph, the digital humanities platform for which I am Research Lead.
Conference Paper · Co-organiser
Undercover Agents: Women, Crime, and Detection in the Global 19th Century, University of St Andrews, August 2025
Presented at the conference I co-organised with Professor Sara Lodge, with funding from the British Association for Victorian Studies.
Podcast · Guest
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 & pressFeatured
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 profileAffiliations
PhD in English, School of English
Awarded June 2026 · AHRC-SGSAH funded, 2022–2026
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Permanent · 2015–present
Member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP), the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS), the Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA), and the Modern Language Association (MLA).
Work with me
Alongside my academic post, I take on work in the fields I research. Rates and availability on enquiry.
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.