My research focuses on Tamil literature and media, with particular attention to how questions of form, language, and representation emerge across different historical and political contexts that span across South and Southeast Asia.
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My current research investigates how the modern novel takes shape within Tamil’s distinctive linguistic and cultural world, asking how the language’s historical depth and expressive range enable it to bear the aesthetic and ideological pressures of literary realism. Central to this inquiry are questions of representation, narrative authority, and the social work of literature, especially in relation to the histories and afterlives of caste, colonialism, and migration. My first book, The Tamil Realist Novel in South and Southeast Asia which addresses these themes, is currently in press with Oxford University Press.
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A separate strand of my research, titled Postmillennial Tamil Visual Cultures, examines how new visual and narrative forms are reshaping the terrain of Tamil cultural expression. From neo-noir films to graphic novels and virtual reality fiction, these works mobilize genre experimentation to engage critically with caste, masculinity, and class mobility, offering fresh representational strategies for contemporary Tamil life. Articles from this research have been published in South Asian Popular Culture and the edited collection Tamil Cinema in the 21st Century: Caste, Gender and Technology
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​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
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