About

I joined the Chair of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures as a tenured faculty member in 2025, after a long and winding career in the humanities and social sciences in India, the Netherlands, Singapore, Canada, Germany, and Belgium. I previously held positions at Chemnitz University and Goethe University, Frankfurt. I specialize in 20th and 21st century comparative Anglophone literatures and cultures with a regional focus on East Asia, Africa, and South Asia, with a thematic focus on conflicts, communal bonds, insurgencies, populism, public life and migrancy. I’ve authored essays on figures and themes as wide-ranging as Aung San Suu Kyi, Salman Rushdie, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Indian cinema, Brexit, terrorism, and the civil war in Burma, among others. I interviewed/hosted prominent novelists and theorists such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Arundhati Roy, Yann Martel, Homi K. Bhabha, Mohsin Hamid, Tom McCarthy, Amit Chaudhuri, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, and Tabish Khair.

I co-edit Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium, and serve on the advisory board of Philosophy, Politics and Critique and The Journal of Alterity Studies and World Literaturs. My latest monpgraph, published wiht Cambridge University Press, is Insurgent Cultures: World Literatures and Violence from the Global South (2024). Other recent books include the co-edited volumes Writing Brexit (2022, Routledge), Violence in South Asia (2020 Routledge), Narratives of the War on Terror (2020, Routledge) and Mapping World Anglophone Literatures (Routledge, 2024, w/Frank Schulze-Engler). I am currently working on a monograph titled Postcolonial Fever: Anatomy of an Exhausted Paradigm (Routledge 2026, contracted), and a Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of the Global South (w/Lars Eckstein).