Research output per year
Research output per year
Accepting PhD Students
PhD projects
Practice based doctoral projects; anticolonial and political cinema; activist and documentary films; Third Cinema; South Asian cinema including Bengali cinema, Indian indie cinema, Bollywood and disporic cinema; tricontinental film flow; Indian Partition narratives; personal and counter archive, oral history and testimony; emotional and creative labour of women and below the line crew; and adaptation of literature into films.
I am a film & cultural studies scholar and a documentary filmmaker with a background in English & comparative literature, and Linguistics. I completed my second PhD in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews before joining the University of Northumbria in 2023. Prior to this, I was an Associate Professor of English and taught for over two decades at different higher education institutions in India, including Presidency College/ University (Dept of English), Kalyani Government Engineering College (Dept of Humanities), Institute of English, and Acharya BN Seal College, University of North Bengal (Dept of English).
My doctoral thesis at St Andrews centred on the Bengali cinema of the 1970s made by Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, and Satyajit Ray, aiming to recover their film practice in the transnational Third Cinema historiography. This research will majorly inform the monograph I am writing on Indian Third/Oppositional Cinema Practice. The field work I undertook for my thesis between 2015 and 2019 has led the way for my forthcoming feature length documentary on Ritwik Ghatak, the Bengal Partition, and refugee crisis. I have a second specialisation in Cultural Studies, having completed my first doctoral thesis in 2013 at Jadavpur University on the mediatisation of Hindutva discourse.
Since completing my PhD at St. Andrews, my research interest has widened to tricontinental political cinema and its facilitation of cultural encounters between filmmakers from the Global South. I am interested in the ways in which these encounters created the foundations of solidarity, navigated within the political backdrop of the Cold War, and enabled an understanding (or lack thereof) of political and cultural projects hitherto unfamiliar to them.
I welcome PhD proposals in any of the above areas as well as the ones on transnational political, anticolonial, and Third Cinema, Bengali and Hindi Cinema, Indian Parallel Cinema, diasporic cinema, censorship, documentary, women in cinema, creative labour, social and cultural histories of South Asia, and practice-based projects.
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
Film and Television Studies, PhD, University of St Andrews
Feb 2015 → Feb 2020
Cultural Studies, PhD, Jadavpur University
2007 → 2013
Teacher Training (TESOL), MA, Institute of Education
2006 → 2007
Linguistics, MPhil, The English And Foreign Languages University
1995 → 1997
Teacher Training, PGDip, The English And Foreign Languages University
1994 → 1995
English Literature, MA, University of Burdwan
1990 → 1992
English Literature, BA (Hons), University of Burdwan
1986 → 1990
University of St Andrews
Jul 2021 → Aug 2024
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Book/Film/Article review › peer-review
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review