I am a postdoctoral researcher in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, where I research and teach on slavery’s global entanglements in the Black Atlantic world and beyond: in particular, I am interested in the transatlantic slave trade as it impacted the Caribbean, as well as in Indian Ocean dependencies and Indian labour/indentureship diasporas. I am currently working on a second book project (Habilitation), tentatively titled “Black Atlantic Ecologies: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Black Life Writing beyond the Colonial Anthropocene,” which intertwines forms and media of black life writing with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ecologies.
In my research and teaching I am particularly interested in relating texts, performances and visual art to aesthetic, material and political formations of resistance, refusal and repair. My research interests span broadly from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, with occasional dips into earlier centuries.
I received my PhD in English Literature from Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg. Published as Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds(2021, Palgrave), it explores contemporary Anglophone literature, culture and new media forms in interplay with post- and decolonial feminism, queer studies and affect theory in the works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel.
My PhD research was completed with the support of travel and research grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Volkswagen Stiftung, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Max Weber Stiftung, the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften Würzburg, and Erasmus+, among others.
I received my MA in English Literature, American Literature and Comparative Literature from King's College London and Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, where I was awarded highest distinction for an MA thesis on the (de)construction of postcolonial female voice and identity in neo-Victorian narratives.
Research and Teaching Interests:
Contemporary Anglophone literatures, Anglophone literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Caribbean Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Indian and Indian Diaspora literatures, Black Britain, Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism, the Blue Humanities, Victorian Ecologies, Neo-Victorian literature, Gender and Queer Studies, Media Studies, the Digital Humanities.