I am currently working on two projects.
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My first book project, Tamil Realisms: Reading the Global Tamil Novel investigates the growth and evolution of the postcolonial Tamil realist novel produced in India, Sri Lanka, and the Southeast Asian countries of Singapore and Malaysia from the 1940s to the 1980s. This research has been funded by grants from The Townsend Center of the Humanities, Humanities Research Fellowship (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon grant), Hellman Society of Fellows, Bruce.R.Pray book workshop grant and an AIIS - NEH senior fellowship.
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My second project, Post Millennial Tamil Visual Cultures assesses evolution of global Tamil visual narrative forms, its linkages to Tamil cultural modernity and gendered consumption patterns. Articles arising out of this study has been published in South Asian Popular Culture and Tamil Cinema in the Twenty First century: Caste, Gender and Technology.
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Past Projects:
My doctoral project, Textual Spaces of Reconciliation: Reading Postcolonial Sri Lanka is a comparative literary project that considers the relationships between the political project of reconciliation and the creative spaces of English and Tamil postcolonial Sri Lankan literature written from 1983 -2009, during the years of militarised civil war in the island. Through an emphasis on the importance of fictional narratives to mediate violence and imagine creative alternatives to entrenched conflict, my research reveals connections among the literary activities of reading and writing, the intellectual labour involved in recognizing histories of violence, and the political work of reconciliation.
Articles based on my research on Sri Lankan literature and film have appeared in Postcolonial Text, Journal of Commonwealth Literature,
Textual Practice and as an encyclopedia entry in The Encyclopedia of Sri Lankan diaspora.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Tamil Studies at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. My research focuses on global Tamil literatures, postcolonial literature, and the filmic and digital cultures of contemporary South Asia and its diasporas. Specifically, my work examines narrative forms and their connections to South Asian cultural identity formations, as well as race and ethnic politics.
Before arriving at UC Berkeley, I was a lecturer of Tamil Studies in the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS) from 2015-2019.