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.

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Personal profile

Biography

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.

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

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):

  • SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Education/Academic qualification

Film and Television Studies, PhD, University of St Andrews

Feb 2015Feb 2020

Cultural Studies, PhD, Jadavpur University

20072013

Teacher Training (TESOL), MA, Institute of Education

20062007

Linguistics, MPhil, The English And Foreign Languages University

19951997

Teacher Training, PGDip, The English And Foreign Languages University

19941995

English Literature, MA, University of Burdwan

19901992

English Literature, BA (Hons), University of Burdwan

19861990

External positions

University of St Andrews

Jul 2021Aug 2024

Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

Recent external collaboration on country/territory level. Dive into details by clicking on the dots or