Media & Press

Media & public engagement

The Empire Sleuths podcast, which I host for the Empires Collective, alongside podcast appearances, featured-researcher profiles, and public writing. For enquiries about interviews, features, or commentary, please use the contact form.

Much of the public engagement below grows out of the doctoral project, From Brighton to Bombay: Mobility and the Nineteenth-Century Female Detective, and its recognition by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH) in April 2025. Since September 2026 it also includes Empire Sleuths, the podcast of the Empires Collective, which carries the same questions of detection, empire, and mobility into conversation with other scholars. The remainder is earlier public writing, from before the PhD, on subjects outside Victorian studies. Together they give a general-readership route into research that is described in more academic terms on the research page, and in more technical terms in the glossary.

This page is deliberately narrower than talks & presentations, which lists conference papers, invited lectures, and roundtables delivered to academic audiences. What appears here instead is aimed at a general readership: a podcast I host and one on which I have appeared as a guest, the Empires Collective’s digital projects, institutional profiles, and a single piece of pre-PhD magazine writing, rather than the fuller scholarly record. If you are a journalist, podcast producer, or editor rather than an academic reader, this is the page to start from; the research and publications pages assume more background in the field.

Podcasts

Empire Sleuths podcast cover art
Podcast · Host

Empire Sleuths

An Empires Collective podcast · Hosted by Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury

Detectives, crime fiction, and the mobile lives of women across the nineteenth-century world. Empire Sleuths investigates Victorian detective fiction, female detectives, and the colonial print cultures and mobility networks that carried crime writing across the nineteenth-century world. Episodes are published with chapter marks and a full, speaker-corrected transcript.

Apple Podcasts Spotify RSS feed All episodes

Episode 1 · · 45:49

Vaibhav Parel on Diasporic Crime Fiction, Questions of Empire and Nationality

In the debut episode I talk with Vaibhav Parel, an AHRC Northern Bridge doctoral researcher at Newcastle University and a former colleague from the University of Delhi, about the historical depth of detective fiction. We read the recent wave of historical crime novels set in British India — Abir Mukherjee’s Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee in 1920s Calcutta, and Sujata Massey’s Perveen Mistry, one of Bombay’s first women lawyers — to ask how these books stage nationalism, gender, and the uneven experience of empire: who is allowed to be a detective, whose crimes are visible, and whose disappear.

Episode page & transcript Download MP3

Guest appearances

Podcast · Guest

The Lost Detectives Podcast

Episode 7: In Conversation with Maitrayee Roychoudhury · Hosted by Claire Whitehead, University of St Andrews

A wide-ranging conversation about Victorian female detectives across Britain, Australia, and India. The discussion covers the emergence of female detective fiction in the Bengali Battala tradition, the role of mobility and colonial transport networks in shaping crime fiction, the figure of the nobeena (New Woman) detective, and the transnational adaptation of detective narratives in the age of steam — touching on the detective characters Bama, Kusum, and the villainess Bijoli Bala. Listeners new to these terms may find the glossary useful alongside the episode.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Empires Collective

I am a member of the Empires Collective, an interdisciplinary cohort of researchers and academics — literary historians, film theorists, computer scientists, and philologists — that examines the legacies of imperialism through a critical-theoretical lens, using multimedia formats such as podcasts, blogs, video games, and discussion forums. Empire Sleuths is the collective’s podcast.

Game · 2026

Empire Veil

A project of the Empires Collective

A cooperative investigation game played in the browser. Players take the roles of women investigators, read evidence, and follow transport routes between ten cities of the nineteenth-century imperial world — from Calcutta, Benares, and Delhi to London, Cape Town, and Melbourne — to expose a conspiracy. Its campaigns ask what counts as evidence, whose testimony is admitted, and which networks carry information when the official ones will not.

Play Empire Veil
Collective

Members & research strands

empirescollective.com

The collective’s members work on diasporic crime fiction, identity and masculinity in Arabic fiction, digital infrastructures, film strips and visual culture, queer lives, memory and affect, and periodical research. Full biographies, including mine, appear on its members page.

View the collective

Features & profiles

Featured Researcher

SGSAH Featured Researcher

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities · April 2025

Selected as the SGSAH Featured Researcher for April 2025, spotlighting the AHRC-funded doctoral project, From Brighton to Bombay: Mobility and the Nineteenth-Century Female Detective, which is described in full, with its research questions, on the research page.

View profile
Research Portal

St Andrews Research Portal

School of English, University of St Andrews

The institutional research profile maintained by the School of English, listing the doctoral project, its supervisors, and academic activity at St Andrews. It is the most reliable single record of the project’s institutional status, alongside the fuller curriculum vitae published on this site.

View profile

Public writing

Book Review

“This History of Indian Food Goes Where No Food Historian (or Instagram Photo) Has Ever Gone Before”

Scroll.in · 2016

A review essay exploring the cultural and historical dimensions of Indian food history for a general readership, written in 2016, before the start of the doctoral project and outside its Victorian and Bengali subject area.

Read on Scroll.in

This is the only item of general-readership writing linked from this site; the journal articles, the book chapters on Ama Ata Aidoo and Fergus Hume, and the earlier essays on Wilkie Collins and H.D. are academic writing, and appear with full citations on the publications page instead.

Press & interview enquiries

I am happy to speak with journalists, producers, and event organisers on Victorian and Bengali detective fiction, the New Woman, mobility studies, and the history of the book.

Contact me