Research
My research examines modern and contemporary Tamil literature and media across South and Southeast Asia, focusing on how literary and visual forms engage questions of language, representation, and political formations. I am particularly interested in how aesthetic form responds to historical pressures such as colonialism, caste, war, and migration, and how Tamil’s linguistic depth and transregional circulation shape the emergence of realism, genre experimentation, and narrative authority. Across my work, I explore how cultural production becomes a site for negotiating identity, memory, and social transformation.
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The Tamil Realist Novel in South and Southeast Asia
My current book project, The Tamil Realist Novel in South and Southeast Asia (in press with Oxford University Press), examines how the modern novel takes shape within Tamil’s distinctive linguistic and cultural world. The study asks how Tamil’s historical depth and expressive range enable it to absorb and transform the aesthetic and ideological pressures of literary realism. Focusing on South and Southeast Asia, the book analyzes questions of representation, narrative authority, and the social work of literature in relation to the intertwined histories of caste, colonialism, and migration. It argues that the Tamil realist novel does not merely adopt European forms but reconfigures realism through the specific intellectual and political histories embedded in the language itself.
Postmillennial Tamil Visual Cultures
A second strand of my research, Postmillennial Tamil Visual Cultures, investigates how emerging visual and narrative forms are reshaping Tamil cultural expression in the twenty-first century.
This project examines neo-noir cinema, graphic novels, and virtual reality fiction to explore how genre experimentation engages questions of caste, masculinity, and class mobility. These works develop new representational strategies that reimagine contemporary Tamil life across South and Southeast Asia.
Articles from this research have appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and in the edited collection Tamil Cinema in the 21st Century: Caste, Gender and Technology.
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Sri Lankan Literature
​​My doctoral research focused on contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil literature and culture, examining how narratives shaped by war, displacement, and migration negotiate Tamil identity across national and diasporic contexts. I explore how literary form responds to the dislocations of civil conflict and exile, and how Tamil writers reimagine belonging through experiments with genre, memory, and language. Articles from this research have been published in Textual Practice, Postcolonial Text and Journal of Commonwealth Literature