A talk by Pavitra Sundar on her new book,
Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema.
Discussants: Meheli Sen (Rutgers) and Shana L. Redmond (English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race)
Moderated by Debashree Mukherjee (MESAAS)
Time: 4:15pm - 5:45pm
Location: 208 Knox Hall, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont
Pavitra Sundar is Associate Professor of Literature at Hamilton College. Prior to Hamilton, Sundar held a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College and taught at Kettering University, Oberlin College, and the University of Michigan and in the AFSC’s prison teaching program. She earned her doctorate in Women’s Studies and English at the University of Michigan, and a bachelor’s degree in English and Psychology at Ithaca College.
Professor Sundar writes and teaches about film, literature, and sound, with a focus on South Asia. Her research interests span cinema and media studies, postcolonial literary and cultural studies, sound studies, and women’s and gender studies. Sundar’s monograph Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema is available as an open-access volume (University of Michigan Press, 2023).
Deeply committed to collaborative work, Sundar has co-organized an interdisciplinary seminar on sound studies with Celeste Day Moore (Hamilton College), co-organized a film festival and symposium on Indian cinema at the George Eastman Museum with Anaar Desai-Stephens (Eastman School of Music), and co-edited a special issue on “Decolonial Feminisms” with Debashree Mukherjee (Columbia University) and another on “Masculinities” with Praseeda Gopinath (Binghamton University). She is founding member of the Accent Research Collaborative, which co-edited Thinking with an Accent (University of California Press, 2023, open access).
Shana L. Redmond (she/her) is a 2023 Guggenheim fellow, and the author, most recently, of the award-winning Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke UP, 2020). She is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race and Columbia University and immediate Past President of the American Studies Association (2023-2024).
Meheli Sen is is Associate Professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) and Director of the Cinema Studies program at Rutgers University. Her research area is post-independence Indian cinema, particularly Hindi and Bengali language films. She is especially interested in questions of gender, genre, modernity, globalization, and new media cultures. Sen’s book, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema (2017) explores the supernatural in Bollywood cinema, and the varied modes through which it raises questions of film form, history, modernity, and gender in South Asian public cultures. She has co-edited the anthology Figurations in Indian Film (2013).
