I read, write, and edit stories, poems, articles, genre-bending things-in-between across media. Having received a doctoral degree in contemporary literature and media studies from the Ohio State University in 2017 for my dissertation, “Books with Bodies: Experientiality in post-1980s Multimodal Print Literature,” I am currently working on my first monograph, focusing on multimodality, contemporary book culture and book arts, and (meta)cognitive engagement they elicit from readers/audiences. As a researcher, I specialize in the systematic study of the aesthetic experiences offered by North American and British multimodal narrative/anti-narrative texts and my work is informed by theories of cognition (present-day cognitive science as well as twentieth century philosophies of experience), narrative theories, multimodality studies, and comparative media studies. My critical and scholarly writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetics Today, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, South Asian Review, Post Script, and Latinos and Narrative Media (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). In Fall 2017, I joined California State University, Sacramento as an Assistant Professor of post-1945 Anglophone literature and media.
I am also the author of Open Couplets –my debut novel published by Yoda Press (India) in 2017. Identified as one of the notable books of September 2017 by World Literature Today, Open Couplets follows the chimera-chasing adventures of ethnographer Ira Chatterjee for a lost idol-maker in Kolkata and a missing poet in Lucknow.
At present, alongside the scholarly monograph, I am working on my second novel. My short stories, articles, and poems have appeared in The Hindu BLink, Himal Southasian, The Ladies Finger, Muse India, Aaduna, Poydras Review, and other venues in South Asia and the US. I have also worked as freelance reporter for The Times of India’s Kolkata Mirror, a web portal of Network 18, and as a coordinator for The Statesman Voices in the past. Given my interest in global Anglophone literature and my experience as an author who has written for South Asian audiences, I work as the Associate Editor of Papercuts published by the Desi Writers’ Lounge. Papercuts is a bi-annual print and online magazine that publishes writers across the world while also offering an unique space to showcase South Asian sensibilities in English writing (without compelling authors to subdue provincial nuances in order to cater to a hypothetical and homogeneous ‘global’ audience).
Through both my creative and scholarly projects, I explore the relation of literary or art “forms” with the aesthetic experiences they can offer, the meanings they can convey, and the possibility of sharing these experiences and meanings within and across different communities.