Her main research and teaching interests are transnational literature, crime and detective fiction, and the oral-written interface in the colonial Eastern Cape. She holds a PhD on transnational feminist aesthetics in South Asian diasporic literature. She was the recipient of a Commonwealth Doctoral Scholarship in 2004 and completed her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 2006. Two recent publications are Sherlock Holmes in Context, Palgrave Macmillan (2017), and A Survey of South African Crime Fiction: Critical Analysis and Publishing History (2017). She has also guest edited a special issue of Current Writing on South African crime fiction (2013) and of The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies (2016) on postcolonial and transnational crime fiction.* [see end for recent publication list]