Maitrayee Roychoudhury

Biography

My research asks how women moved through the physical and literary landscapes of the nineteenth century, and how those movements were represented, celebrated, and policed. I work across three national traditions — British, Australian, and Indian — reading popular fiction alongside the transport technologies and print networks that carried it. My doctoral thesis, 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 experiences of travel from which it arose.

I came to Victorian studies through questions of space and dissent. My earliest published work, on Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, examined how disordered domestic and imperial space encodes fractured Victorian selfhood; my MPhil thesis, “Dissent in Victorian and Edwardian Fantasies by Women,” traced how women writers used fantasy and children’s literature as vehicles of subversion. Alongside this Victorian work, I have written on modernist feminist historiography in H.D.’s Palimpsest and on the radical women-scapes of Ama Ata Aidoo’s postcolonial fiction — abiding interests in how women negotiate space and power across colonial and postcolonial contexts.

My current research brings these strands together through a decolonial approach to Victorian studies. Working with Bengali Battala fiction and the periodical culture of colonial Calcutta alongside British and Australian crime writing, I argue that the female detective was not a purely metropolitan invention but a transnational figure who emerged, simultaneously and in dialogue, across the British Empire. The doctoral project has been funded by the AHRC through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, which named me a Featured Researcher in April 2025.

I have taught English literature in the University of Delhi system since 2010, at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, St Stephen’s College, and, since 2015, ARSD College, where my permanent position sits. Before entering academia full time, I worked as an Assistant Editor in the Academic Division of Oxford University Press.

Research in brief

My published and ongoing work gathers around Victorian popular and detective fiction; mobility and transport studies; postcolonial and decolonial approaches to the nineteenth century; gender studies and the figure of the New Woman; and the print culture of colonial Bengal. A fuller account of these strands, including the doctoral project and its research questions, is set out on the research page.