About

I came to literary studies through an enduring interest in oral cultures, folklore, and the narrative traditions that exist at the margins of institutional literary canons. Growing up within the rich storytelling cultures of Bengal, I became increasingly aware of the striking absence of indigenous authors, vernacular traditions, and postcolonial childhoods within dominant critical conversations on children’s literature. This absence — particularly in the field of postcolonial juvenile and young adult literature — became the intellectual impetus for my academic work. As Ngũgí wa Thiong’o writes, “language carries culture, and culture carries the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world.” My research has consistently sought to recover and foreground those literary and oral traditions that have historically remained peripheral to Eurocentric frameworks of literary criticism.

My scholarship began at the intersection of Irish and Bengali literary cultures, but over time it has evolved into a deeply interdisciplinary and multifaceted body of work engaging literary studies, folklore studies, postcolonial theory, childhood studies, cultural memory, and archival history. I am particularly interested in how myth, fantasy, oral storytelling, and vernacular epistemologies shape constructions of childhood and national identity across colonial and postcolonial contexts. This interdisciplinary approach has enabled me to bring a distinctive comparative perspective to literary studies — one that moves fluidly between texts, archives, oral histories, and material histories of empire.

I hold a Ph.D. in English from Dublin City University (2022), where my doctoral dissertation on the fantastic in Irish and Bangla juvenile literature was completed under the supervision of Prof. Keith O’Sullivan. Prior to this, I completed my M.A. and B.A. at University of Calcutta and Presidency College respectively, where I developed my foundational interests in comparative literature, colonial modernity, and vernacular literary cultures.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of History at Maynooth University, working on the COLVET project, a major archival investigation into the history of colonial veterans of the First World War. This research has further expanded the interdisciplinary dimensions of my work, bringing together literary inquiry with archival practice, imperial history, memory studies, and transnational histories of war and migration. My fieldwork has taken me to archives and research collections across London, Kew, Lucknow, Delhi, and Kolkata.

My scholarship has appeared in publications with Routledge and Edinburgh University Press, as well as in peer-reviewed international journals. I also serve as Editor of Postcolonial Interventions and on the editorial board of Critical South Asian Studies. The manuscript of my first monograph, The Postcolonial Fantastic: Constructing Irish and Bengali Literary Childhoods that develops a comparative framework for understanding fantasy, folklore, and childhood across Irish and Bengali literary cultures is under review with Bloomsbury Academic.

Alongside my research, teaching has remained central to my academic practice. I have taught undergraduate and postgraduate modules at Dublin City University and University College Dublin across a broad range of subjects, including literature of the long 18th and 19th centuries, contemporary climate literature, children’s and young adult literature, and postcolonial writing. In the classroom, I aim to encourage students to think comparatively and critically about literature’s relationship to history, memory, ecology, empire, and cultural identity, while also foregrounding voices and traditions often overlooked within conventional literary curricula.