I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of India, Britain, and the British Empire. Since coming to U of L in 1995, I have led three study abroad courses: in Britain in 1998, and in India in 2002 and 2007.

My research and publications focus on the history of India. I have published two general surveys of the topic (The History of India, third edition published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2026, and Modern India, published by ABC-CLIO in 2020), but most of my scholarly work has explored two themes. The first is the history of the so-called Princely States of India, which were semi-autonomous kingdoms that existed within India until 1948-1949. My doctoral dissertation was a study of the interaction of the Indian Princes, nationalist politicians, and the British during the last years of colonial rule in India; it was later published under the title of Sovereignty, Power, Control. In journal articles and book chapters, I have written on such aspects of Princely State history as the transmission of the annals of ruling dynasties, marriage patterns among royal families, relations between Indian monarchs and their nobles, the collection of import taxes by the governments of Princely States (that was an exciting one!), and the reasons that the government of India decided to end the sovereignty of the Indian Princes in the late 1940s.

The second theme of my scholarship is an examination of the experiences of minority groups within the Indian population: African-Indians, Jewish-Indians, and Zoroastrian-Indians. In African Elites in India, Kenneth X. Robbins and I published the most complete survey yet of the experiences of Africans (many of them ex-slaves) who rose to positions of power as soldiers, nobles, and kings in India between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. Several of my published articles have also dealt with Africans in India, and Dr. Robbins and I wrote a chapter on depictions of Africans in Indian art for The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art, edited by David Bindman, Suzanne Preston Blier, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The collection Western Jews in India From the Fifteenth Century to the Present includes my work on Maurice Frydman, a Jewish engineer who became a Hindu holy man, and future volumes of the same series will include studies of analogous themes. My most recent book, Bhownaggree: The Life and Times of an Indian Tory, is a biography of the Parsi (Zoroastrian-Indian) statesman Sir Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree. It emphasizes the role that Bhownaggree’s Parsi background played in his career.