I study the literature and culture of the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am an Assistant Professor of Race, Empire, and Diaspora in the Department of English at the University of Miami. Before coming to Miami, I was a Junior Fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I received my Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida in 2023.

I am currently writing my first book, Edible Empire, which examines the formation of gustatory and literary tastes in colonial South Asia. I bring together consumption and reading to argue that colonial modernity formulates new tastes, here for new foods and literary forms. Such tastes mobilize existing and profoundly local understandings of caste and race even as they forge new categories that serve both the empire and emergent nationalisms. I am also working on my next project, which considers how disciplines come to be, particularly how something as lively as the natural environment becomes professionalized as a subject of study and service under imperialism. This disciplining of ecologies, I show, shapes how narrative form grapples with the environment.

My work has appeared in ELH, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Studies, Victorian Review,Global Food History, and The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing.

I welcome research, pedagogical, and community collaborations. The best way to reach me is through email: mxs8454@miami.edu.

My preferred pronouns are she/her.