SHORT BIO

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, where I specialize in British and Postcolonial literatures and cultures. A comparatist by training, I have degrees in both Law (LLB, Hebrew University) and Literature (PhD, University of California, Berkeley). I have been an Honorary Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison, a Fellow at the Cornell Society of Fellows, a Visiting Scholar at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, and a recipient of several major grants for my research.

My research is animated by the conviction that literature carries important knowledge about our world and the way we comprehend it. It is a living lab of our societies and cultures and of the way we create meaning. My first book, Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Fiction and Law, (Oxford 2013) argues that precedent constitutes a sophisticated mechanism for managing change in both literature and the law.  Moving from Victorian Britain to twentieth-century India, my second book, Genres of Emergency: Forms of Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English, (Oxford UP 2023) studies literary genre to understand the varied states of emergency and crisis that have become a fixture of our contemporary world.