I work on nineteenth-century ecology, literature and science.
My current project, Empire of the Sun: Imagining Solar Energy in Colonial India, 1878-1915, examines how British engineers, literary authors, and the greater English-language newspapers from colonial India imagined solar energy as an imperial infrastructure. Proposing the term “solar imperialism” to describe this understudied geopolitical doctrine, the project aims to provide an imperial history of the current energy transition.
My forthcoming book, Changing the Climate at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press 2026), argues that a range of literary authors (Jules Verne, Rokeya Hossain, Mark Twain, etc.) scaled anthropogenic climate change as an apocalyptic, utopian, and literary phenomenon. Paradoxically, they did this not through the scientific paradigm of global warming, but its perverse inverse: global climate control. Thus, the monograph tracks the inscription of anthropogenic climate change into literary modernism long before the advent of “global warming.”
I have published on some of these issues in journals such as Victorian Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Dix-Neuf.
I have experience in organizing, lecturing and grading courses on naturalism, New Imperialism and the New Woman, but also the "new" anthropogenic environments of the Victorian period: the underground, the atmosphere, and the planet. Foci has counted writers such as Émile Zola, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, M. P. Shiel and Helga Johansen.
