Layla graduated from Princeton with a concentration in Political Science and a certificate in African-American Studies Her research focuses on communism in South India, with particular attention to the radicalisation of political prisoners in 1930s Kerala against the backdrop of Gandhian nationalism. Layla is also broadly interested in the flow of revolutionary ideas and the formation of networks between North and South India in this time, as new kinds of national and international solidarity were being formed to constitute an anti-colonial revolutionary politics.
Other academic interests include Caribbean intellectual history as well as the tension between Enlightenment rationality and the “occult” in colonial encounters.
