Personal Statement

I am a scholar of British imperialism and colonialism, with a particular focus on India and the violence of empire, as well as the legacies of this, although I have more recently developed an interest on the impact of empire 'at home', in Britain, especially on its environment. I took rather an eclectic journey to end up at the University of Liverpool; I was raised in both the U.K. and U.S. and received my Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. I thereafter taught at institutions in the U.S., Ireland and Canada, and held research fellowships in India and Australia. I speak Hindi and am a lover of most things Indian - especially Indian food, clothing (the louder the better) and Indian cinema (especially old films from the '50s and '60s), all of which I enjoy inflicting on my students.

Research Overview
My research focuses primarily on violence, particularly in colonial India, especially on the body and embodied forms of violence (including torture and sexual violence); gender and masculinity; pain and trauma; the state and sovereign power; law; biopolitics and governmentality; and necropolitics and bare life. My publications include Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge, 2010), Communalism and Globalisation: South Asian Perspectives (co-edited with Chandana Mathur; Routledge, 2011) South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and Postcolonial Orderings (co-edited with Stephen Legg; Cambridge, 2018), Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (Oxford, 2021; 2025), and Policing and Violence in India: Origins, Nature, Resistance (co-edited with Jinee Lokaneeta, Speaking Tiger). I am currently working on two research projects: one, ENLIvEN (Empire, Nature and Liverpool: Investigating and Engaging with Natural History) is on the role of Liverpool as an imperial hub for the global trade in plants and animals in the 19th-20th centuries, and the impact this has on Liverpool, its people and its environment, and the other on sexual violence as a tool of colonial power in India.