Research
I am a scholar of South Asian religious, visual, and material history, specialising in Hindu traditions, manuscript cultures, sacred objects, religious art, and heritage practices. My research examines how texts, images, relics, artworks, and ritual spaces shape religious memory, authority, and historical consciousness across South Asia and its diasporas.
Working across religious studies, art history, material culture, museum studies, and public humanities, I investigate the historical lives of sacred objects and the changing relationships between religion, colonialism, collecting, archives, museums, and modernity. My work is particularly concerned with the movement of religious materials across devotional, scholarly, and institutional contexts, and with how communities preserve, interpret, contest, and display histories through material forms.
Methodologically, I combine philological, historical, ethnographic, and art-historical approaches, working with Sanskrit, Hindi, Gujarati, manuscript, and archival materials across libraries, museums, temples, and private collections in South Asia and Europe. My research has also increasingly explored questions of heritage, curation, sensory experience, public history, and the ethics of display and preservation.
My first monograph, The Relic in the Glass Cabinet (Oxford University Press), examines the contested history of the Śikṣāpatrī, a nineteenth-century Sanskrit text that came to function simultaneously as scripture, relic, and museum object. More broadly, my scholarship contributes to conversations on material religion, religious modernity, manuscript cultures, visuality, heritage, and the politics of religious representation.
Alongside my academic research, I have held research, curatorial, and collections roles at the British Library, British Museum, Wellcome Collection, SOAS University of London, and the Wereld Museum. These experiences continue to shape my interdisciplinary approach to religion, visual culture, archives, museums, and public engagement.
Teaching
I teach across the fields of Hindu traditions, South Asian religions, material religion, visual and art history, museum and heritage studies, Indian philosophy, and modern South Asian history. My teaching explores the historical and contemporary intersections of religion, colonialism, heritage, visual culture, and public representation.
I have taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, SOAS University of London, University of Roehampton, and the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Courses I have designed and taught include Hindu traditions, Buddhism, Hindu ethics, Indian philosophy, South Asian culture, material and visual culture, religion and museums, and public history.
My pedagogy is interdisciplinary, research-led, and object-oriented. I encourage students to engage critically with manuscripts, artworks, museum collections, ritual spaces, ethnographic materials, and primary sources while reflecting on the historical conditions that shape knowledge production and cultural memory. I frequently integrate museum collections, archives, field visits, and heritage spaces into teaching to connect students directly with material and visual histories.
Public Engagement and Curatorial Practice
My research is closely connected to curatorial practice and public-facing scholarship. I have contributed to exhibitions, collection interpretation, digitisation initiatives, and public programming at institutions including the British Museum, British Library, Wellcome Collection, and SOAS University of London.
My public engagement work includes museum consultancy, manuscript cataloguing, community engagement initiatives, digital humanities projects, public lectures, and collaborations with media and documentary platforms, including the BBC. I am especially interested in how museums, archives, and galleries shape public understandings of religion and history, and how curatorial and heritage practices can foreground historically marginalised voices and communities.
