Further Reading
Further reading & key scholars
The research page names the scholars whose work this project builds on and engages with. This page sets out, in a little more depth, what each of them has contributed and how it bears on the doctoral thesis, From Brighton to Bombay: Mobility and the Nineteenth-Century Female Detective. Terms in italics are explained further in the glossary.
On the female detective and mobility
Britain and Australia
Sara Lodge
University of St Andrews
Sara Lodge’s work on Victorian women’s professional life documents the growth of female private inquiry agents after the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, supplying the real professional context behind the fictional lady detectives of the 1860s casebook novels. She supervises the doctoral project described on the research page, alongside Dr Clare Gill.
View profileAna Parejo Vadillo
Birkbeck, University of London
Ana Parejo Vadillo writes on vehicular vision and female mobility in the Victorian period, examining how the observing passenger — looking out from a train or omnibus window — became a new position from which women could see, and be seen, in public space. Her work underpins the project’s account of how rail travel reshaped perception in female detective fiction.
View profileBen Moore
University of Amsterdam
Ben Moore’s work on the “invisible architecture” of the Victorian railway describes how the infrastructure of rail travel reorganised the built environment and perception together, shaping how fiction represented movement through city and country alike — a framework used throughout the project’s reading of mobility and literary form.
View profileLucy Sussex
Author & literary archaeologist
Lucy Sussex recovered the work of Mary Fortune, one of the earliest known female writers of crime fiction, restoring an Australian strand of the female detective tradition that had been largely erased from literary history. Her recovery work is central to reading the Australian material in this project alongside its British and Bengali counterparts.
View profileNell Darby
Crime historian
Nell Darby researches real-life female detectives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her historical work provides the documentary record of actual women in policing and private inquiry against which the project’s fictional detectives — British, Australian, and Bengali — can be read.
View profileOn Bengali print culture & the New Woman
Colonial and postcolonial India
Shampa Roy
Miranda House, University of Delhi
Shampa Roy’s translations of Bengali detective casebooks have been instrumental in making narratives such as the daroga memoirs and guptakatha fiction available to readers outside Bengali. Her translation work is a direct source for the Bengali primary texts discussed on the research page.
View profileSumanta Banerjee
Historian & cultural theorist
Sumanta Banerjee has documented how real female detectives in colonial India were often drawn from lower-caste communities, whose relative social marginalisation gave them a freedom of movement that middle- and upper-caste women lacked — a paradox that runs through the project’s account of caste, gender, and colonial policing.
View profilePartha Chatterjee
Columbia University
Partha Chatterjee developed the concept of a colonial “new patriarchy”, describing how Bengali nationalist culture sought to contain the emancipatory potential of the New Woman (nobeena) by fusing her image with that of the motherland. The concept is central to this project’s reading of gender and nationalism in Bengali detective fiction.
View profileFrancesca Orsini
SOAS University of London
Francesca Orsini has traced how the Bengali crime writer Panchkari Dey’s fiction was translated into Hindi and Urdu, evidencing the circulation of detective fiction across India’s multilingual literary market — a case of transnational adaptation discussed further in the glossary.
View profileOn decolonial Victorian studies
Reframing the Victorian literary field
Priya Joshi
Temple University
Priya Joshi coined the term “vernacular Victorianisms” to describe local literary cultures produced across and beyond the British Empire during the Victorian period. The framework is central to this project’s decolonial approach, which reads Bengali detective fiction as a parallel tradition rather than a derivative of British originals.
View profileCaroline Sumpter
Queen's University Belfast
Caroline Sumpter’s work on Victorian periodical and popular culture is part of the wider scholarly conversation, alongside Pablo Mukherjee, that has shaped this project’s decolonial approach to Victorian studies and its attention to the periodical press as a vehicle for popular fiction.
View profilePablo Mukherjee
University of Oxford
Pablo Mukherjee writes on postcolonial approaches to Victorian and Indian literature. Developed in conversation with his work and Caroline Sumpter’s, this project challenges the assumption that the Victorian literary field originated exclusively in the metropolis.
View profileFor the doctoral project these scholars inform, see research. For definitions of the terms used above, see the glossary. Students and collaborators working in these areas are welcome to get in touch.