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.
