Who gets to tell a story, and with what tools

Australian Aboriginal literature, and how land, nation and belonging are narrated by writers outside the settler canon.

My doctoral work, Narratives of Land and Nation, read the fiction of Alexis Wright — The Swan Book and Plains of Promise — as a sustained argument about Aboriginal sovereignty, environmental dispossession, and the failures of multicultural policy. That work continues in published research on Aboriginal music narratives, racial refinement, and the representation of Aboriginal suicide in a multicultural Australia.

• Alexis Wright
• Aboriginal literature
• Postcolonial theory
• Land and nation
• Multiculturalism

Computational and archival method applied to literary study — and the teaching of that method to researchers who did not train in it.

As Treasurer of DHARTI, the Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations, I work on bringing digital method into Indian humanities departments. This has meant doctoral coursework lectures at Mohanlal Sukhadia University, a research presentation at Leiden University on Madhubani painting as digital humanities praxis, a workshop at Khalsa University Amritsar, and a paper at the German University of Digital Science on the digital archiving of Partition narratives. I am currently pursuing independent research on archiving the Lande script, historically used by merchant communities in India.

• Digital archives
• DHARTI
• Computational method
• Digital pedagogy
• Lande script

Stardom, fandom, and the visual grammar of Indian cinema and digital advertising.

Published work here includes a chapter on the discursive power of enigmatic stars in Hero and Hero Worship: Fandom in Modern India (Vernon Press), research on star-image aesthetics in Indian digital advertising, and film analysis of Antarmahal and Chakravyuh. I have twice served as a peer reviewer in this field — for Asiascape: Digital Asia and for Popular Communication (Taylor & Francis).

• Celebrity culture
• Indian cinema
• Fandom
• Digital advertising
• Visual literacy

How artificial intelligence changes teaching, employability and academic work — and what must not be handed over to it.

This is the newest strand, and the one that connects the others. As Chief Academic Partnership Officer at GrowQR I work on AI-driven employability intelligence and future-skills ecosystems with universities and industry partners. The research question is deliberately two-sided: what AI genuinely improves in teaching and career readiness, and where human judgement, creativity and cultural literacy have to remain the point. The governing principle is that technology should amplify human intelligence rather than replace it.

• AI in education
• Employability intelligence
• Human + AI collaboration
• Future skills
• Digital pedagogy

The body as a site of meaning, and the work of women performers across theatre, film and digital platforms.

This strand runs from early work on Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues and Vijay Tendulkar’s Silence! The Court is in Session, through transnational feminism in film, to recent research on disabled identity in cultural performance and the comedy of women performers on YouTube. It also shaped the national symposium on women and gender studies I organised at St. Xavier’s College, Jaipur.

• Feminist theory
• Performance studies
• Women writers
• Embodiment
• Digital performance