Keywords: dance; historiography; anti-racism; feminism; activism; South Asia

I joined Royal Holloway’s Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance in September 2015. Prior to my doctoral studies and academic career in the United Kingdom, I studied English Literature (BA and MA) and Cultural Studies in India. My academic background is interdisciplinary and my teaching and research thrives on the intersections of dance studies, performance studies, history, cultural studies and critical theories on race, gender and sexuality. 

My monograph Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism was published in the Palgrave Macmillan New World Choreographies Series in 2014. It subsequently won two of the most prestigious awards in the field: the 2015 de la Torre Bueno Prize, and the 2015 Outstanding Publication Award from the Dance Studies Association (USA). Articles and papers have appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as Economic and Political Weekly, Contemporary Theatre Review, Dance Research Journal, Theatre Research International, Performance Research, Asian Theatre Journal, South Asian Diaspora, South Asia Research, Studies in South Asian Film and Media and CLIO:Women, Gender, History. Essays have also appeared in scholarly volumes by Bloomsbury (Companion to Dance Studies, 2019) and Routledge (Dance Matters Too, 2018; Re-Thinking Dance History, 2017). I am currently working on my second monograph, funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme grant. I am also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance (with Anurima Banerji) forthcoming with Oxford University Press-New York. 

Elected service to the field includes Executive Committee member of IFTR (2015-2019), the Board of Directors of Dance Studies Association (2018-2022) and Co-Convening the Choreography and Corporeality Working Group at IFTR (2017-2022).

I have supervised PhD projects on AR/VR choreography and EU migration; music education in South Asia; Malay dances/identities in Singapore;  theatre in colonial/postcolonial Sri Lanka; and choral/ritual dances in Greek theatre. 

I am interested in supervising projects focused on performance practices from South Asia; British Asian theatre/dance theatre; performance-focused visual art practices (e.g. exhibitions, reenactments); decoloniality and social justice; embodied histories/historiography; and identity politics (e.g. related to questions of race, gender, sexuality and ability).