Manishita Dass

Ph.D., Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford, 2004

Assistant Professor, Screen Arts & Cultures / Asian Languages & Cultures, University of Michigan, 2006 --

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow & Visiting Assistant Professor, Film & Media Studies, Swarthmore College, 2004 -- 2006

Manishita Dass holds a joint appointment in the departments of Screen Arts & Cultures and Asian Languages & Cultures, and is a Faculty Associate at the Center for South Asian Studies. Her research and teaching interests lie in the fields of South Asian film and cultural history, comparative film studies, and postcolonial studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Nation, and Modernity in India , which traces how the space of cinema was imagined in films and in public discourse, in relation to the trope of modernity and the emerging category of the nation, in early-to-mid-twentieth century India. Professor Dass is one of the project coordinators of Tasveer Ghar , a digital network of South Asian popular visual culture ( http://www.tasveerghar.net/index.html ).

Teaching interests : South Asian film cultures; international film history; approaches to national and transnational cinema; cinema, modernity, and modernisms; silent cinema; theories of authorship; colonial and postcolonial cinemas; postcolonial theory.

Research interests : early cinema in India and its intersection with other forms of popular culture; the impact of left radicalism on the film cultures of Bombay and Calcutta in the 1940s-1960s; the question of realism in Indian cinema; the cinematic city; the visual and literary worlds of Bengali modernity; mapping “world cinema.”