A senior researcher at the CNRS, my work focuses on modern and contemporary Indian literature, in particular contemporary Indian poetry and the writers, artists and collectives of Bombay; on the worlds (cultural, linguistic, imaginary) that these works inhabit and remake; on postcolonial modernisms and print cultures, and on the politics of literature.

A lot of this work stems from research in understudied archives (archives of Bombay poets and Bombay modernisms; archives of the Indian branch of International PEN ; archives of the Cultural Cold War in India), and from conversations with contemporary writers.
I take great pleasure in translating Indian poets.

I am interested in the “locations” of literature which I understand as another name for the particular: location as specific geographical spaces such as Bombay/Mumbai; location as specific genres or forms, often the less canonical ones, such as poems, essays, or magazines; location as particular texts, authors, and archives. These locations also act as vantage points from which to reconsider “global” categories or narratives like modernism or cosmopolitanism; institutionalized fields of study like world literature; but also genealogies of Cold War, postcolonial and decolonial struggles. However local or located these specific texts or voices seem to be, part of my work has been to restore their ‘worldliness’, as situated in the political and secular world in which they emerge and as connected to a constellation of other spaces or lineages, and to the whole world of other literatures.

In the context of several collective research projects, I have also worked on censorship and freedom of expression in India, on writers’ collectives and issues of literary activism. 

I direct the UChicago-CNRS Humanities International Research Lab, and coordinate the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures