Assistant Professor
About
(On Scholarly Activity Leave, 2025-26)
During the year 2025-26, I will be on an ACLS Fellowship completing my first book manuscript. This book, The Empire and its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India rethinks the historiography of modern sexual science (and its centrality to contemporary queer and trans studies) from the vantage point of colonial India. Working across archives in English, French, Hindi, and Marathi, I argue that India's encounter with the racist literary and scientific infrastructures of modern sexology engendered forms of "deviant" Indian sexual life that were not rooted in individualist understandings of sexuality as an interiorized inborn identity, but in idioms of racial excess.
Publications
"The Anatomy of Habit: Prison Sexology and the Scandal of Pederasty in Colonial India" GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2023)
"The Sciences of love: Intimate ‘Democracy’ and the Eugenic Development of the Marathi Couple in Colonial India" History of the Human Sciences (2023)
"Don't Ask, Won't Tell? Sexual Science and the Case Biography of Sodomy in Colonial India" Modernism/modernity (2022)
"Show and Tell: Life History and Hijra Activism in India" Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2021)
"Death of a Museum Foretold? On Sexual Display in the Time of AIDS in India" Book Chapter. Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism (2020)
