MANISHITA DASS
Royal Holloway, University of London

Manishita Dass is Reader in Film & Global Media at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research explores intersections of film, political, and literary cultures in South Asia through intermedial history and formal analysis. Her publications include Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India (OUP) & The Cloud-Capped Star (BFI Film Classics / Bloomsbury). She is writing a book about the Indian left cultural movement’s impact on cinema. 

MEHELI SEN
rutgers university

Meheli Sen’s research focuses on Hindi and Bengali language cinemas. Her work has been published in journals like Cinema Journal, Framework, South Asian Popular Culture, among others. She has co-edited an anthology titled Figurations in Indian Film (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). Sen’s book, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema was published in 2017 by The University of Texas Press. She is currently working on a manuscript on horror and digital media cultures in South Asia.

MEREDITH BAK
Rutgers University

Meredith A. Bak is the author of Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture (MIT Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in journals including The Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, Early Popular Visual Culture, The Velvet Light Trap, and Film History, as well as several edited collections. Her research focuses on children’s toys, media, and material cultures from the nineteenth century to the present.

MOINAK BISWAS
Jadavpur University

Moinak Biswas is Professor and Department Head of Film Studies and Coordinator of The Media Lab at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Among his publications are Apu and After: Revisiting Ray’s Cinema (2005), Chaplin (1997, 2000) and Ujan gang baiya (1988, 2018). He edits the Journal of the Moving Image and Kolkata 21. He has written and co-directed the award-winning Bengali feature film Sthaniya Sambaad (2010) His video installation Across the Burning Track was commissioned for the 11^th Shanghai Biennale, 2016.

PINAKI DE
Kolkata University

Pinaki De is a graphic designer who has designed almost 500 book covers to date. He is the winner of the Oxford Bookstore Prize for the best cover designer of India at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2017, and the PublishingNext award for the best book cover designer in India, twice in 2017 and 2019. He designed the layout for The Pather Panchali Sketchbook (HarperCollins 2016) and Travails with the Alien (HarperCollins 2018). A member of The Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives, he is also the assigned designer of The Penguin Ray Library, the special editions that seek to preserve Ray’s archival works.

PRIYADARSHINI SHANKER
University of North Carolina Wilmington

Dr. Priyadarshini Shanker is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies. Her dissertation Cinephilia as Archiving: The Intermedial Archiving of Popular Bombay Cinema is being furthered as a book project Through a Woman’s Eye: Creating, Curating, Critiquing and Archiving Bombay Film & Media. Her scholarship, teaching and curatorial work are informed by the intersections of gender and labor. Her course Contemporary Cinefeminisms recently received the Feminist Teaching Award from the Gender Studies Research Center at UNCW.

PROJIT BIHARI MUKHARJI
UPenn /Ashoka University

Projit Bihari Mukharji is a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University. He is also Professor of the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is particularly interested in the historical interactions between knowledge traditions and political ideologies. His most recent monograph is Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, c. 1920-66 (Chicago, 2022).

RAJA GUHATHAKURTA
UC Santa Cruz

Guhathakurta, a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society since 2021, is a Professor/Astronomer and Chair in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. His research is focused on the formation and evolution of galaxies – specifically, their accretion/cannibalism history, dark matter content, chemical enrichment, and star formation history. Other research interests include interstellar dust grains and their interaction with radiation, and the stellar populations and chemical abundance of globular clusters. Guhathakurta also dabbles in art, specializing in realistic portraits in oil and pencil.

REGINA LONGO
Brown University

Regina M. Longo is an archivist, historian, and producer. She manages the MCM Media Archives at Brown University. She began her archival career at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. She has produced feature film restorations for the Albanian National Film Archives, served as director of the Board of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and Associate Editor of Film Quarterly. She is on the editorial board of JCMS and volunteers her time to aid capacity building projects for AV archives at risk in Brazil, the Balkans, and beyond. 

SUDIPTA SEN
UC Davis

Sudipta Sen is Professor of History and Middle East/South Asia Studies, University of California, Davis, and the author of Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace, 1998; Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India, 2002; Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River, 2019, and most recently, the edited volume (with May Joseph) Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia.

SUKANTA CHAUDHURI
Jadavpur University

Sukanta Chaudhuri’s first interest is the European Renaissance, on which he has published two monographs, edited several volumes, and recently brought out his collected essays, Things Reborn. He has also worked extensively on Rabindranath Tagore: as editor of the Oxford Tagore Translations and the Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore, and chief coordinator of Bichitra, the comprehensive Tagore website. He is among the pioneers of digital humanities in India. He has translated widely into and out of Bengali. He writes and campaigns about his home city Kolkata.

SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI
Jadavpur University

Supriya Chaudhuri works on early modern European literatures, Indian cultural history, cinema and modernism, and translates Bengali poetry and fiction. Recent publications include Religion and the City in India (ed., Routledge, 2022); articles in Postcolonial Studies, Thesis 11, and Literature Compass; and chapters in The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form (Open Book Publishers, 2022), The Cambridge Companion to Tagore (CUP, 2020); and Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media (Florida UP, 2019).

SUVADIP SINHA
University of Minnesota

Suvadip Sinha is the author of Entangled Fictions: Nonhuman Animal in an Indian World (2022) and co-editor of Postcolonial Animalities (2019). He has published academic essays in journals like Cultural Critique, Interventions, South Asian Popular Culture, and Feminist Media Histories among others. At UMN, Sinha serves on the advisory board of Environmental Humanities Initiative. He is most nonacademically interested in food and ghosts.

TRINANKUR BANERJEE
UC Santa Barbara

A doctoral candidate in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, Trinankur Banerjee works on post-1947 Bengali comedy to understand the molecular dimensions of post-Partition experience that become legible through popular comedy. His primary interest is in exploring how the generic specificities of comedy might help us rethink questions of stardom, aural cultures, and historiography of Indian cinema at large.

VINZENZ HEDIGER
Goethe University, Frankfurt

Vinzenz Hediger is a film scholar and theorist who currently works on documentary form in relation to trust and conflict. His most recent publications include “Pandemic Media. Preliminary Notes towards an Inventory” (2020, with Laliv Melamed, Philipp Keidl, Antonio Somaini), “Jean-Luc Godard. Film Denken nach der Geschichte des Kinos” (2022, with Rembert Hüser) and “Films That Work Harder. The Circulations of Industrial Film” (forthcoming, with Yvonne Zimmermann and Florian Hoof). He teaches at Goethe Universität Frankfurt.

ANJALI ARONDEKAR
University of California Santa Cruz

Professor, Feminist Studies, and Founding Co-Director, South Asian Studies. Her work engages the politics and poetics of sexuality, race and historiography, with a strong focus on comparative empires within South Asian and Indian Ocean studies. Author of the monographs For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2010) and Abundance: Sexuality’s Historiography (Duke University Press, forthcoming in 2023), she also co-edited Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies, a special issue of the journal GLQ in 2016.

ANNA BRUSUTTI
University of California Santa Barbara

Continuing Lecturer, Film and Media Studies. Brusutti’s research and teaching interests include Italian cinema, American cinema, science fiction, auteur studies, childhood and media.

CRISTINA VENEGAS
University of California Santa Barbara

Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies. Venegas teaches courses related to history, criticism and theory with an emphasis on Latin American film and media. She is the author of Digital Dilemmas: The State, the Individual and Digital Culture in Cuba (Rutgers, 2010), a Choice Book Award recipient; and co-editor of Digital Activism, Community Media, and Sustainable Communication in Latin America (Palgrave, 2020). Her current book project is titled Julio García Espinosa and the Imperfect Imagination. Co-editor of the Media Matters book series for Rutgers University Press, Venegas has curated numerous film programs and served as a juror for several international film festivals.

NAOKI YAMAMOTO
University of California Santa Barbara

Associate Professor and Vice Chair, Film and Media Studies. Yamamoto specializes in film theory, Japanese cinema, Marxist criticism, documentary films, avant-garde art, post-colonial studies, and Japanese cultural history. His book Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in A Global Frame (California, 2020) explores Japan’s active but previously unrecognized participation in the global circulation of film theory during the first half of the twentieth century. He has published widely in both English and Japanese, including a co-edited anthology in Japanese on media theory and practice in 1950s Japan.

PATRICE PETRO
University of California Santa Barbara

Patrice Petro is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center and Presidential Chair in Media Studies. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of twelve books, including The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (with Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelaca, and E. Ann Kaplan, 2017), After Capitalism: Horizons of Finance, Culture, and Citizenship (with Kennan Ferguson, 2016), Teaching Film (with Lucy Fischer, 2012), Beyond Globalization: Making New Worlds in Media, Art, and Social Practices (with A. Aneesh and Lane Hall, 2011) etc.

SARAH WELD
University of California Santa Barbara

Professor and Chair, Germanic and Slavic Studies. Weld focuses on childhood, infancy, and children’s literature across national and disciplinary boundaries and has authored two related books. Her publications also include two articles on childhood in Russian film. She serves on the Board of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature and is Convener of the IRSCL Congress “Ecologies of Childhood” which will take place at UCSB in August 2023. 

UTATHYA CHATTOPADHYAY
University of California Santa Barbara

Assistant Professor, History.  Chattopadhyay studies and teaches the social and cultural history of South Asia and British imperialism since the eighteenth century. His research explores the role of British colonialism in reshaping the agrarian frontier of eastern Bengal and the political economy of intoxicant commodities. He is working on projects:  Bodies that Cohere: Notes on Ganja and Gender in Colonial India, and Political Economy, Intoxication, and Sacral Binds in Imperial History.