Ghosh teaches courses on modern South Asia, the British empire, gender, and colonialism. She is the author of Sex and the Family in Colonial India: the making of empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and with Dane Kennedy, co-editor of Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006).

Ghosh's teaching and research interests focus on understanding the history of colonialism on the Indian subcontinent. For her first project, she has written extensively on gender, culture, law, archives, and colonial governance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India, and was interested in the kind of everyday history that occurs in families and households. 

Her current research focuses on popular and radical political movements in early and mid-twentieth century India and the ways in which violence against the British colonial state became an important, but historically underemphasized, form of protest. In working on this project, Ghosh has become fascinated with the ways that political violence becomes a central part of popular historical narratives.  In connection with this research, she teaches a freshman-writing seminar on Gandhi and the politics of nonviolence.