An Associate Professor of English with the School of Liberal Arts at IIT Jodhpur, since 2012. A University I rank holder and gold medallist at the Bachelors and Masters levels, her PHD is from IIT Madras. A Fulbright Fellow (2009) and a Rachel Carson Fellow from Ludwig Maximillian University, Munich (2016), Vidya works in the areas of Environmental Humanities, Environment and Culture, Environment and Heritage and Blue Humanities. She has co-edited four books: Ecoambiguity, Community and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism (Lexington Press Maryland, 2014), Ecocriticism of the Global South (Lexington Press, Maryland 2015), The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (Routledge 2019) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Medical Environmental Humanities (2023).  Her most recent book titled Pravesh: Rite of Passage (co-authored) was released by the Honourable Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi in the year 2024. She was the recipient of the Public Outreach Grant (2017) from the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Munich to make her debut documentary film Under Another Sky (2020). Her collaborative project with IIT Madras on temple conservation, was recently awarded the UNESCO Asia Pacific Award of Distinction (2024), for exceptional conservation efforts.