Questions & answers

Her research examines Victorian and nineteenth-century literature through the lenses of mobility studies, crime fiction, and postcolonial theory. Her 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 technologies and experiences of travel from which it arose, reading British, Australian, and Bengali fiction alongside one another.

She is a permanent Assistant Professor of English at ARSD College, University of Delhi, where she has taught since 2015. She has submitted her PhD thesis in the School of English at the University of St Andrews.

She holds a BA (Hons), MA, and MPhil in English from the University of Delhi, and is completing a PhD in English at the University of St Andrews. She was placed first in the University of Delhi in both her BA and MA, and her MPhil thesis examined dissent in Victorian and Edwardian fantasies by women.

Her PhD is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH). In April 2025 she was named an SGSAH Featured Researcher.

Her work reads female detective fiction from Britain, Australia, and colonial India together, arguing that the figure was not a purely metropolitan British invention but emerged simultaneously and in dialogue across the British Empire. This includes British casebook and New Woman fiction, Australian crime writing, and the Bengali Battala tradition of detective narratives.

Battala refers to the vibrant vernacular publishing scene of nineteenth-century Calcutta, centred on the upper Chitpore Road, which produced popular fiction, sensational narratives, woodcuts, and periodicals. Her research examines Bengali detective fiction from this milieu, including works by Dinendrakumar Ray and figures such as the New Woman detective Kusum.

Alongside Victorian popular and detective fiction, she works on mobility and transport studies, postcolonial and decolonial approaches to the nineteenth century, gender studies and the New Woman, and the print culture of colonial Bengal. She has also published on Wilkie Collins, H.D., and Ama Ata Aidoo.

Yes. She has taught English literature in the University of Delhi system since 2010, at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, St Stephen’s College, and ARSD College. Her teaching spans Victorian and nineteenth-century literature, popular fiction and genre, postcolonial and world literature, and gender and mobility.

Yes. She has delivered conference papers, invited lectures, roundtables, and workshops in the United Kingdom and India. Speaking and lecture invitations can be sent through the contact form on this site.

She welcomes enquiries from students and researchers interested in Victorian and postcolonial literature, crime fiction, mobility studies, and the history of the book. The For Students and Collaborators page outlines topics she is glad to discuss and offers notes on postgraduate study and funding.

The best way is the contact form on this site, or email to contact@maitrayee.me. She aims to reply within a few working days.