Research Interest

• Colonial Literary and Visual Culture of India
• Regional Indian Literature in English Translation
• Gender and Spatiality in Literary Narratives
• 19th-Century English Fiction and Visuality

• Visiting Faculty of Humanities – Indian Institute of Information and Technology, Design and Manufacturing (IIITDM) Kancheepuram, Chennai, India July 2016-Aug 2017
• Postdoctoral Teaching Assistant – Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Singapore Sept-Dec 2014
• Teaching Assistant – Division of English, NTU, Singapore. 2010-2012

• Classical Literature
• Indian Fiction in English
• Short Story Classics
• Survey of English Literature
• The Rise of the Novel
• World Civilizations and Texts

• NTU Research Scholarship (2009-2013)
• Bharathidasan University Endowment Scholarship (2005)

• Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA)
• British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS)

• Senior Reviewer, The Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities 2018 to be held in The Art Centre Kobe, Japan, 30 March-1 April 2018.

 Peer-Reviewed Chapters In Books

• “‘You might pioneer a little at home’: Hybrid Spaces, Identities and Homes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855)”. Place, Progress, and Personhood in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell. Ed. Emily Morris, Sarina Gruver Moore, Lesa Scholl. Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2015.
• “One Hundred and Five, North Tower: Writing the City as a prison-home narrative in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859)”. Dickens and the Virtual City: Urban Perception and the Production of Social Space. Ed. Sara Thornton and Estelle Murail. Palgrave. October 2017.
• “Good pictures …are always another poem”: Mapping spatialities in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1842) and Elizabeth Siddall’s The Lady of Shalott (1853). Poetry and Painting: The Lyrical Voice of Pre-Raphaelite Paintings. Ed. Sophia Andres and Brian Donnelly. Peter Lang Publishers, 2018.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Papers

• “He made me fall at the feet of a woman”: Masculine Anxieties and Dysfunctional Romance in Tamil Cult Film Subramaniyapuram (2008), Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V13/n2/v13n238.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.38 Published on June 26, 2021
• “Nineteenth Century Eurasians and Spatiality in Emma Roberts’ Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, with Sketches of AngloIndian Society (1835)”. Rupkatha Jounal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. Vol. 12, No. 6, December, 2020. 1-10. Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V12/n6/v12n612.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n6.12 
• ‘The “secret of the bedstead”: Unraveling the domestic machinery in Wilkie Collins’s “A Terribly Strange Bed” (1852). Victorian Web. September 2017. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/collins/divya1.html

Newspaper Articles

• “Why we should follow science fiction.” The Hindu, 30 August 2016, p.16.
• “Art before the selfies.” The Hindu, 4 Oct 2016, p.16.

Magazine Articles

• “The Role of Humanities in a Technological Knowledge Economy”. Higher Education Review. June 2017.

• “Why Read Literature in a Technological Classroom?” Lightning Talk. SSN College of Engineering, Chennai. 14 December 2019.
• Resource Person for a UGC-HRDC Refresher Course for Faculty at the University of Madras, Chennai, on 07 September 2019. Title of Lecture: “Feminine Folktales and Patriarchal Structures in Girish Karnad’s Naga-Mandala”
• “Narrative Fractures of Power and Gender in Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘The Hunger of Stones’” , Sri Ramakrishna College of Arts and Sciences for Women, Coimbatore. 28 August 2019.
• “Glimpsing Gender in Indian Short Fiction”, Dr N.G.P College of Arts and Sciences, Coimbatore, 7 September 2018.
• “‘Don’t Turn Me Out’: Reorienting Love and Revenge in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)”. Catholic Junior College, Singapore, 6 Oct 2010.
• “Narrative and Reflective Writing as Artifacts”, Indian Institute of Information and Technology, Design and Manufacturing, Kancheepuram, India, 9 February 2017.
• “Research Strategies in Literary Studies”, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Chennai Campus, 15 December 2017.

• “Tracking Nineteenth-century Anglo Indian Orphans in Emma Roberts’ Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan (1835)”, International Seminar and Workshop on Anglo-Indian Studies at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, on 5 August 2017.

• “Tracing time-space trajectories in Toru Dutt’s “Our Casuarina Tree” (1881)”. An international symposium titled “Beyond the Clock: An interdisciplinary Symposium on Time”. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. 16 March 2019.
• “Landings at Madras”: Contemporary Re-centring of Ninteenth-Century Colonial Visual Culture of India”, The International Conference on Arts and Humanities, March 30-April 1, 2018, The Art Centre Kobe, Kobe, Japan.
• “Victorian Madurai Illustrated: The cultural logic and commodity of Victorian India”, Australasian Victorian Studies Conference, 15 June 2017, Melbourne, Australia.
• “ ‘Numskull and the Rabbit’: Spatial Design Thinking and Narrative Art in the Panchatantra”, International Conference on Design and Manufacturing-IConDM 2016, Indian Institute of Information and Technology, Design and Manufacturing, Kancheepuram, India, 17 Dec 2016.
• ‘Her duty to set her young man free’: Liberty, Hybridity and Identity in Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower (1882) and The Return of the Native (1878)”, Hardy Conference, Yale University, the U.S.A, 10 June 2011.
• “Sherlock 2010: Contemporary Pink versus Victorian Scarlet”, The Contemporary Conference, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 26 June 2011.
• ‘”Why is the hotel called the “Palace Hotel?’: Narrative negotiations and the dialectics of identities in Wilkie Collins’s The Haunted Hotel (1879)”, Victorian Conference (AVSA), University of Adelaide, Australia, 3 Feb 2011.
• “Re‐Orienting the Houses in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights”, Reorienting Victorian Studies, Australasian Victorian Studies Conference, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 27 June 2010.
• “Puzzling the texts of the play-within-the play in Hamlets”. Between the Sausage and the Lobster: Mastering Early Modern English Literature at Oxford (A Colloquium). Hertford College, University of Oxford, the United Kingdom, 2 May 2007.

• A National Seminar on Jane Austen, 31 October 2018, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras.

• Victorian Indian Identities, 6-7 June 2018, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. (Co-convenor: Dr Avishek Parui, DoHSS, IIT Madras)

• A One-day Workshop on World Short Stories at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, on 1 March 2019.

• A Seminar on Sundara Ramaswamy’s Tamarind History, 21 January 2020, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras.

• S Keerthana, Ambivalent Sexism in Contemporary Tamil Women’s Fiction (Ongoing).
• J Mrithula, Popular Revisionist Writings in Indian Literature (Ongoing).
• A Hari Sankar, Narrating Oriental Life: Novels of Captain Philip Meadows Taylor (Completed, 2024).
• ​B Neelima, Life Writing, Marginality, and Spatiality (Completed, 2023).

• Malavika M –The Role of Dance and Music in Campus-Based Malayalam Movies (Completed,  2023).
• Swati Nair—Contemporary Indian Film Adaptations of Jane Austen’s Novels (Completed, August 2021).
• Rahul Jose—Construction of masculinities in the novels of R.K. Narayan (Completed, August 2021).
• Zuha Moideen–Indian Chick-Lit as Postfeminist Texts (Completed, August 2018).
• Advaith J– The Dark Age: An Analysis of Fear in 19th-Century Gothic Fiction​ (Completed. May 2019).

• Ms Arya V.M (MA English student, Pondicherry University). Title of Project Guided: A Foucauldian Analysis of Space and Power in Select Works of Indian Short Fiction (2018).