For Students & Collaborators

Working together

I am always glad to hear from students and researchers whose interests overlap with mine. This page sets out the areas I work in, how I can help, and a few notes on postgraduate study and funding drawn from my own experience.

Topics I’m glad to discuss

Areas where I can offer supervision, feedback, or a conversation

Victorian & nineteenth-century literature

Sensation and detective fiction, the New Woman, children’s literature and fantasy, and the relationship between literary form and industrial modernity.

Crime fiction & detection

The history of the detective figure — particularly the female detective — across British, Australian, and Bengali traditions from the 1860s onward.

Mobility & transport studies

How railways, steamships, and urban transport reshaped literary form and female agency, and how texts themselves circulated in the age of steam.

Postcolonial & decolonial studies

Bengali print culture, vernacular Victorianisms, and transnational approaches that decentre the metropolitan account of the nineteenth century.

Ways to work together

Research & reading

Conversations about a research idea, reading in Victorian or postcolonial literature, or framing a project in crime fiction or mobility studies.

Talks & panels

Invited lectures, seminars, and panel contributions on Victorian literature, female detective fiction, and colonial print culture.

Postgraduate study

Guidance on applying for doctoral study and funding, drawn from my own AHRC-funded PhD and the funding-application sessions I have contributed to.

A note on postgraduate funding

My own doctoral research is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH). I have taken part in SGSAH funded-PhD roundtables and School of English funding-application sessions, and I am happy to share what I learned about the process with prospective applicants.

If you are considering doctoral study in the humanities, it is worth looking early at doctoral training partnerships such as SGSAH, at institutional scholarships, and — for research based in India — at national fellowships such as the University Grants Commission’s Junior Research Fellowship. A well-defined project, a realistic timeline, and a clear sense of fit with a supervisor matter as much as the writing itself.

Get in touch

If any of this resonates with your own interests, please send me a short note about what you are working on. A paragraph or two is plenty to start a conversation.

Contact me