About

My work engages the politics and poetics of sexuality, caste and historiography, with a strong focus on comparative empires within South Asian and Indian Ocean studies. Currently, I hold the Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair in Feminist Studies. I was the Founding Director, Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), 2020-24.  CSAS is the first area studies center to be focused explicitly on economic and social justice in South Asia and its broader diaspora.

I am primarily interested in three concepts that have increasingly become the focii of methodological debates within historical and/or literary studies: archives (what constitutes historical evidence), exemplarity (how do we read evidence) and geopolitics (where do we read from). Such methodological concerns bring genealogies of area studies to bear on Anglo-American histories of literature and culture and ask how such an attention to “area” calibrates questions of race, gender and sexuality.

Broadly speaking, I read and write within established disciplines (history, literature, law) and field formations (area studies, queer/sexuality studies), mobilizing South Asia through its multilingual and divergent colonial and national formations.

My first monograph, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association, 2010) considers the relationship between sexuality and the colonial archive by posing the following questions: Why does sexuality (still) seek its truth in the historical archive? What are the spatial and racial logics that compel such a return? And conversely, what kind of “archive” does such a recuperative hermeneutics produce? Rather than render sexuality’s relationship to the colonial archive through the preferred lens of historical invisibility (which would presume that there is something about sexuality that is lost or silent and needs to “come out”), I engage sexuality’s recursive traces within the colonial archive against and through our very desire for access.

My second monograph, Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023), refuses the historical common sense that archival loss is foundational to a subaltern history of sexuality, and that the deficit of our minoritized pasts can be redeemed through acquisitions of lost pasts. Instead, I theorize the radical abundance of sexuality through the archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj—a caste-oppressed devadasi collective in South Asia—that are plentiful and quotidian, imaginative and ordinary. Here, abundance is inextricably linked to the histories of subordinated groups in ways that challenge narratives of their constant devaluation. Summoning abundance over loss upends settled genealogies of historical recuperation and representation and works against the imperative to fix sexuality within wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and precarity. Multigeneric and multilingual, transregional and historically supple, Abundance centers sexuality within area, post/colonial, and anti/caste histories.

Education

Ph.D., English, University of Pennsylvania

B.A., College Scholar, Cornell University

Awards