Eleven years in the literature classroom, and a parallel life in the studio

I work at the intersection of higher education, digital humanities, artificial intelligence and creative practice. As Chief Academic Partnership Officer at GrowQR I lead collaborations with universities, institutions and industry partners to build learning ecosystems powered by AI employability intelligence — while continuing to teach as Assistant Professor with the Directorate of Open and Distance Learning at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar.

I have taught English literature and language since 2014 — at St. Xavier’s College in Jaipur, at Chitkara University in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, and now at Amritsar.

My doctorate, completed at IIS University in 2021 under Prof. Sudha Rai, examined the fiction of the Waanyi writer Alexis Wright. It asked how land and nation are narrated by someone writing from outside the settler canon — and that question, about who holds the authority to tell a story, still organises most of my research.

Alongside literary study I work in digital humanities. As Treasurer of DHARTI, the Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations, I help bring computational and archival method into Indian humanities departments, through doctoral coursework, workshops, and conferences. That work has taken me to Leiden University, to the German University of Digital Science in Potsdam, and to a good many seminar rooms closer to home.

Between 2022 and 2023 I ran international partnerships at Chitkara University’s Office of International Affairs, where I coordinated the 12th Global Week — a programme that brought more than seventy-five visiting faculty from twenty countries onto one campus for a week.

I also paint. I have exhibited at Samanvai Art Gallery and the Jaipur Kala Mahotsav, illustrated two children’s books, written two more, and directed a short film on gender. I mention this not as a hobby but because it is the same work: attention to how images and stories carry meaning, whether the medium is a Victorian poem, a Madhubani painting, or a YouTube video.