Research Themes

I wrote my doctorate on the penal settlement established by the British in colonial Mauritius during the early nineteenth century. Subsequently, my research has tried to map the complex networks of convict transportation that cut across the British Empire, from and between the Caribbean, Cape of Good Hope, Mascerene Islands, India, Burma, Straits Settlements, the Andaman Islands, and Australia. I take a subaltern studies approach, to look at penal transportation from a convict perspective that is sensitive to the significance of race, gender and class in the making of colonial societies. I am also interested in subaltern life-history writing; the intersections between global and colonial history; the relationship between convictism, slavery and indenture; and popular memory of repressive colonial regimes. I am becoming increasingly fascinated by the implications of the Internet for historical research, especially the interface between 'academic' and 'family' history in the writing of histories of ordinary lives. Most recently I have been trying to bring my archival work into dialogue with ethnographic work to explore how people in ex-penal colonies think about and represent their history.

Current Research Projects

I am currently principal investigator on the ESRC UK-India interdisciplinary collaboration Integrated Histories of the Andaman Islands.

This 3-year ESRC funded research project is a UK-India collaboration with the anthropologist Prof. Vishvajit Pandya and the historian of science, Dr Madhumita Mazumdar.