He is director of the Dhar India Studies Program at IU and is the academic director of IU's overseas campus in New Delhi. Dodson's current book project, tentatively titled The City is a Form of Belonging: Urbanism in Colonial North India, 1880-1920, examines the roles of bureaucracy and colonial governance in creating urban meaning around the turn of the 20th century, focusing on the cities of Banaras and Jaunpur, in particular. His first book, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture (2007) was a study of Indian Sanskrit pandits who found work in colonial education. He has also edited Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories (2011), a book of essays and photographs, and Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia (2012).