Victorian Literature · Mobility Studies · Crime Fiction · Postcolonial Studies
Maitrayee Roychoudhury
Victorian literature, gender, and the mobile lives of women across the nineteenth-century world
PhD Researcher at the University of St Andrews and Assistant Professor at ARSD College, University of Delhi. 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.
Research Interests
Bridging Victorian studies, mobility research, and decolonial approaches to literary history
Victorian Literature & Popular Fiction
Sensation fiction, detective casebooks, New Woman narratives, and the relationship between literary form and industrial modernity. From Wilkie Collins’s disordered domestic spaces to Grant Allen’s mobile heroines.
Crime Fiction & Detection
The history of detective fiction with particular attention to female detective characters across British, Australian, and Bengali literary traditions from the 1860s to the early twentieth century.
Mobility & Transport Studies
How technologies of travel — railways, steamships, omnibuses, and bicycles — reshaped literary form, female agency, and the circulation of texts across the British Empire and beyond.
Postcolonial & Decolonial Studies
Decentring Victorian studies through transnational perspectives. From Bengali Battala publishing to Ama Ata Aidoo’s radical women-scapes, examining vernacular Victorianisms and colonial print networks.
Gender Studies & the New Woman
Female professional identities, the figure of the New Woman across British and Bengali literary traditions, and the intersections of gender, caste, and class in shaping women’s mobility and agency.
Print Culture & Periodicals
Battala publishing, graphic satire, serialisation, and the transnational circulation of popular fiction. From Calcutta’s vernacular presses to the Tagore family’s Bharati journal.
Current Project · PhD Research
From Brighton to Bombay
My PhD at the University of St Andrews, funded by the AHRC through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, 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.
Recent Activity
Selected talks, publications, and media appearances
The Lost Detectives Podcast
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.
Listen on Apple PodcastsSGSAH Featured Researcher
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 profileThe Moving Gaze and its Captured Subjects
Victorian Popular Fiction Association, July 2024
The Victorian female detective in the colonies — examining how imperial mobility networks shaped the figure of the female sleuth beyond metropolitan Britain.
Empire’s Dry Bones: Fergus Hume’s Gypsy Detective
Cross Cultural Circa Nineteenth Century, May 2024
Reading Hume’s itinerant detective figure through the lens of Romani mobility, racialisation, and colonial networks.
Affiliations
Current institutional affiliations and memberships
University of St Andrews
PhD Researcher, School of English
AHRC-SGSAH Funded · 2022–present
ARSD College, University of Delhi
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Permanent · 2015–present