# Empires Collective > An interdisciplinary collective of researchers examining the legacies of imperialism through podcasts, games and digital artefacts — culture read against colonialism. The Empires Collective is an interdisciplinary cohort of researchers and academics that examines the legacies of imperialism through a critical-theoretical lens using multimedia formats. We are literary historians, film theorists, computer scientists, and philologists. The collective uses a multiplicity of digital artefacts to explore the connection between culture and colonialism — blogs, podcasts, video games and discussion forums — spotlighting the sociopolitical and historical forms imperialism took in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its links to the contemporary moment. ## Members - 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 (https://www.maitrayee.me): 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. - 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. - Dipankar Sarkar — Engineering and digital infrastructure (https://www.dipankar.name): 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. - 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. ## Research strands - Diasporic crime fiction: Detective writing as colonial history in disguise — who is permitted to investigate, whose crimes are legible, and what the whodunit does with the nation. The subject of the first Empire Sleuths episode. - Identity and masculinity in Arabic fiction: How imperial encounter is written into gendered selfhood, and how Arabic literary form carries and resists it. - Digital infrastructures: The pipes, archives and platforms that now mediate cultural memory — and the older asymmetries they quietly reproduce. - Film strips and visual culture: Projection, circulation and the colonial image: what was shown, to whom, and on what apparatus. - Queer lives: Sexuality and its archives under and after empire, including what the record was built not to hold. - Memory and affect: Literary history as a history of feeling — how modern South Asian and global modernist writing holds loss, belonging and aftermath. - Periodical research: The nineteenth- and twentieth-century press as the infrastructure of empire: serial fiction, reprint networks and the making of a reading public. ## Podcasts ### Empire Sleuths — https://www.empirescollective.com/podcasts/empire-sleuths Empire Sleuths investigates Victorian detective fiction, female detectives, and the colonial print cultures and mobility networks that carried crime writing across the nineteenth-century world — from Brighton to Bombay. Hosted by literary scholar Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury. Host: Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury. Feed: https://www.empirescollective.com/podcasts/empire-sleuths/rss.xml - Episode 1: Vaibhav Parel on Diasporic Crime Fiction, Questions of Empire and Nationality (45:25) — https://www.empirescollective.com/podcasts/empire-sleuths/1-vaibhav-parel-diasporic-crime-fiction In the debut episode of Empire Sleuths, host Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury talks with Vaibhav Parel — an AHRC Northern Bridge doctoral researcher at Newcastle University and a former colleague from the University of Delhi — about the surprising historical depth of detective fiction. Parel traces his path from teaching Agatha Christie in Delhi to a PhD on South Asian diasporic crime writing, arguing that the genre's "entertainment" surface hides a rich subtext of colonial history, class, and power. Together they read the contemporary wave of historical crime novels set in British India — Abir Mukherjee's Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant "Surrender-not" Banerjee in 1920s Calcutta, and Sujata Massey's Perveen Mistry, one of Bombay's first women lawyers — to ask how these books stage nationalism, gender, and the uneven experience of empire. Who is allowed to be a detective? Whose crimes are visible, and whose disappear? What happens when the servant, rather than the sleuth, becomes the moral centre of the story? Ranging from the politics of representation to the instability of "crime" itself, this conversation offers a postcolonial lens on why the whodunit remains such a powerful way to reckon with the afterlives of empire. Full transcript is published on the episode page. ## Gallery — digital artefacts ### Empire Veil (Game, 2026) — https://empireveil.empirescollective.com Empire Veil is a cooperative investigation game played in the browser, with nothing to install and no account to make. Players read evidence, follow transport routes between ten cities of the nineteenth-century imperial world — Calcutta, Benares, Delhi, Madras, Alexandria, London, Cape Town, Melbourne, Kingston, Hong Kong — and try to expose a conspiracy before it closes around them. Its three campaigns put the historical argument in the player’s hands: what counts as evidence, whose testimony is admitted, and which networks carry information when the official ones will not. ## Pages - https://www.empirescollective.com/collective: every member, with full biographies - https://www.empirescollective.com/podcasts: all shows - https://www.empirescollective.com/gallery: digital artefacts - https://www.empirescollective.com/join: how to take part — the collective is open and growing - https://www.empirescollective.com/contact: contact form and email - https://www.empirescollective.com/newsletter: mailing list Contact: hello@empirescollective.com