I am a historian of South Asia with a focus on twentieth-century India. My research and teaching interests encompass nationalism and state formation, territorial partitions, urban history, colonialism and decolonization. I hold a joint appointment in the History Department and the Department of Asian Studies.I earned my PhD from the Department of History at Princeton University and my M.A. in anthropology from the New School for Social Research. My book, Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital (Stanford University Press, 2022), was shortlisted for the 2023 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize, sponsored by the New India Foundation. It delves into the history of Delhi during the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, examining the city’s transformation under the pressures of the Second World War and the partition of India. Bridging studies of high politics with the ground-level experience of partition, it shows what the politics of the nation-state meant in everyday life. My current project explores citizenship formation in the new republic. It centers on Delhi from decolonization to the suspension of democracy during the Emergency rule (1975-1977) and its restoration afterward. This research explores how different sections of urban society conceptualized, interpreted, and asserted citizenship in the new republic, shaping Indian democracy in the process.

I teach a range of courses, including the survey course “Introduction to Modern India” and seminars on colonialism, urban history, gender and caste, the Gandhian movements, the Cold War in South Asia, and the transnational history of twentieth-century partitions.