She continued her postgraduate work at Cornell University, earning an MA in English in 1996 and a PhD in colonial and postcolonial literature in 2000.

She moved to the University of Cambridge in 2001, where she is professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of English and a teaching fellow at Churchill College.

She argues that developing a demanding relationship to history is essential to understanding the formative and shaping nature of the imperial project on British life.

[25] It was subsequently criticised in the press after a speaker said that the British Empire was worse than the Nazis, and that Churchill was the "perfect embodiment of white supremacy".

According to Donald, "the working group seems to have changed direction, with the second event not aligning with the initial proposals that council [the college’s trustee body] saw; nor did their suggestions for the third.

In June 2017, a group of Cambridge students asked the university to include more black and ethnic minority writers in its English literature curriculum, an initiative strongly supported by Gopal.

[32] She argues that decolonisation in the curriculum context is ‘about’ having access to information and narratives, which reframe our understanding of the multiple lineages and sources of knowledge.

[33] In the context of racial discrimination in the United Kingdom, Gopal has discussed white fragility, suggesting that a "way of deflecting engagement with race is to personalise matters";[34] a 2018 twitterstorm arising from Gopal arguing that a tweet by her Cambridge colleague Mary Beard represented white fragility has been taken as a case study by academic work on social media discourses about race.

[35] In October 2019, Gopal criticised the Equality and Human Rights Commission report "Tackling racial harassment: Universities challenged" for its language and not addressing the systemic disadvantages faced by black and minority ethnic students or the ways whiteness dominates power structures and pedagogy.

[37][38] Gopal told a journalist from The Sunday Times it "was behaviour I very much doubt a white man of middle age who identified himself as a lecturer" would have faced.

[38] King's denied that Gopal had been subject to racial profiling, and claimed that the CCTV footage of the incident revealed no wrongdoing by staff.

[42] In October 2018, King's issued a statement announcing that it would put in place a "clearer and simpler means of reporting incidents" and that it would review its procedures for handling complaints.

[48] Gopal argued the report cherry-picked data and minimised and denied structural and institutional racism, asserting that it read like a propaganda document rather than a piece of research.

[58][59] Gopal released a statement saying that Varsity had "published misleading and false claims" about her words that had subjected her to "a concerted racist and misogynist attack across the British right-wing press.