Five researchers, one question

Dr Debolina Dey

Azim Premji University, Bhopal

Debolina currently teaches at Azim Premji University, Bhopal and has previously taught at Ramjas College and Lady Shriram College for Women. They have been a fellow at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin and recently a Barker fellow at Durham University. They have also been a recipient of the Charles Wallace scholarship. Debolina’s research interests are divided between contemporary issues — digital cultures, queer lives — and historical aspects of literary culture, especially the 19th century. They also love all aspects of food: reading, writing, eating and cooking.

Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury

ARSD College, University of Delhi

Maitrayee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, ARSD College, University of Delhi. She works on detective fiction and female sleuths from the global nineteenth century. Her PhD investigates a global framework for the New Woman detective across London, Melbourne, and Calcutta. Her upcoming publications explore Fergus Hume’s querying of race and empire in his Melbourne trilogy.

Host

Empire Sleuths

Shaped the history it is built on

Empire Veil

Vaibhav Parel

Newcastle University

Vaibhav is an AHRC Northern Bridge funded doctoral researcher at Newcastle University, working on South Asian diasporic crime writing — Abir Mukherjee, Sujata Massey, A. A. Dhand and Harini Nagendra among them. Previously a long-standing member of the faculty at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, they have written and published widely on crime fiction, postcolonial literature, memory and historicity. They are the first guest on Empire Sleuths.

Guest, episode 1

Empire Sleuths

Dipankar Sarkar

Engineering and digital infrastructure

Dipankar builds the collective’s digital infrastructure — the production pipelines, sites and playable artefacts through which the research reaches an audience. An engineering leader with more than fifteen years in systems architecture and AI engineering, he holds a B.Tech from IIT Delhi and an M.S. from Arizona State University. Within the collective his interest is in what digital infrastructures do to cultural memory.

Built and maintains it

Empire Veil

Dr Zehra Kazmi

Institute of Ismaili Studies

Dr Zehra Kazmi is a Research Associate in the South Asian Studies Unit of the Institute of Ismaili Studies and is a literary scholar specialising in modern South Asian Muslim literature and culture. Dr Kazmi is a literary historian of memory and affect, with a background in South Asian literatures, critical Muslim studies, postcolonial theory, and global modernisms.