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My research and pedagogy have been driven by inveterate and eclectic curiosities, a delight in speculation, a low boredom threshold and a rather old-fashioned belief in erudition. These principles have resulted in undergraduate teaching across the department’s core curriculum—from Shakespeare to Soyinka—and in developing new offerings in African-American literatures and cultures, Australian literature and cinema, cross-cultural and multi-media adaptations of Shakespeare, and modern and contemporary women writers (online). I take a contrapuntal approach to decolonizing canon and curriculum. My graduate seminars are generally designed to address problems that shape modernity or to develop modes of being and reflection designed to alter the worlds we inhabit. My most recent graduate seminars have discussed the refugee crisis, creolization and syncretism, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

My current research focuses on forced migration and involuntary displacement. I have forthcoming book chapters on trauma and refugee narratives and on the “denizen” rather than the “citizen.” I have presented papers on dignity, distress and care at the UNESCO-RILA Spring School, Glasgow, and on the bane and dream of belonging at NIAS, Amsterdam. My vigorous cross-disciplinary collaborations with political scientists on the war in Afghanistan, with lawyers on the deportation of refugees, and with a colleague in the Smith School of Business on neo-colonialism and corporate social responsibility have been exciting and illuminating. To remind myself that I am a literary scholar and pedagogue, I have co-authored forthcoming essays for Oxford Bibliographies and for Teaching Anglophone South Asian Diasporic Literature (MLA).