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Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D. 2000, NYU; M.A. 1994, University of Pennsylvania; B.A. 1991, Northwestern University.
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Research Interests: Indian cinema, South Asia, anthropology of media, visual anthropology/visual culture, popular culture, cultural policy, nationalism, postcolonial theory, diasporas, and theories of globalization.
Selected Works:
Casting Culture: An Ethnography of the Bombay Film Industry in Postcolonial India, Duke Univ. Press, forthcoming.
Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema, Routledge. 2004.
“And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, eds. L. Abu-Lughod, F. Ginsburg & B. Larkin. Univ. of California Press. 2002.
“Centenary Commemorations or Centenary Contestations? -- Celebrating a 100 Years of Cinema in Bombay,” Visual Anthropology 11(4), 1998.
Films
Gimme Somethin’ to Dance to! (1995) – about the growing popularity of bhangra music in New York City
Current News / Projects
Updated July 2009 The past year has been pretty hectic even though I was on sabbatical in the fall with the Goddard Junior Faculty Fellowship. The source? Our second son, Siddharth, who is a bundle of energy (and joy) and keeps everyone in the family very, very busy! I came back to teaching this spring after a gap of an entire calendar year since I was on maternity leave in spring 2008. I taught the MAP World Cultures: India class, for my second time and I want to thank Dwai Banerjee, Ram Natarajan, and Will Thomson for the great job they did as TA’s for the course. I also taught the graduate “Culture & Media II” class for the first time and that was truly an enjoyable and enriching experience and I want to thank the students in that class for a great semester.
In February, I gave a short presentation, “The Making of Bollywood,” at the first-ever Global South Asia conference at NYU. The conference was convened by the South Asian Studies Program Initiative, a group of very committed undergraduates who did a great job of organizing the event, which promises to become an annual affair.
In April, I was invited by the Southern Asia Institute at Columbia University to give a talk in their weekly seminar series. I presented the talk, “Not Just Another Song and Dance Routine: Music, Developmentalism, and the ‘Bollywood Effect’”, which examines Hindi filmmakers’ ambivalence toward the presence of song and dance sequences, usually perceived as the most distinctive feature of popular Indian cinema. The talk was based on a manuscript of the same name that I had finished writing in the fall and which I submitted to Cultural Anthropology for review. The article discusses how, rather than being a taken-for-granted feature of Hindi cinema, song sequences are actually a site of tension, debate, and intense negotiation among members of the Hindi film industry, which reveal the circulation and internalization of development discourse and its temporal logics.
In terms of publications, I have chapters in two recently published edited collections. The first, “Mumbai vs. Bollywood: The Hindi Film Industry and the Politics of Cultural Heritage in Contemporary India,” is a part of Global Bollywood, which was published by NYU Press late last summer. The second, “The Limits of Decency and the Decency of Limits: Censorship and the Bombay Film Industry” in Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction was published this past June by Indiana University Press.
This summer, I’m staying put in order to finally finish the revisions to my manuscript, “Producing Bollywood” (still looking for the perfect accompaniment post-colon). Hope everyone has a productive and restful summer and see you in the fall!
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