NEWS!!
New book just out! See content & purchase details on the Josef Wirsching photobook here.
Bombay Hustle was awarded an Honorable Mention for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize 2021.
My essay, “Somewhere between Human, Nonhuman, and Woman: Shanta Apte’s Theory of Exhaustion” won the 2021 Katherine Singer Kovács Essay award from the Society of Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS).
I am a film and media scholar based in New York. My book Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Sept 2020), does a deep dive into histories of filmmaking in late colonial India. This book is partly inspired by my own work experience in Mumbai’s film and TV industries in the mid-2000s.
I teach at Columbia University as an associate professor in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS). I also edit the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, and curate film exhibitions. Currently, I am at work on several research projects, including a second book that is tentatively titled “Tropical Machines: Extractive Media and Plantation Modernity” You can read more about my work here.
[Image credit: Hemant Chaturvedi. Torn film poster, Ganga Theatre, Bikaner, Rajasthan.]