Participant Info
- First Name
- Debashree
- Last Name
- Mukherjee
- Country
- United States
- State
- NY New York
- dm3154@columbia.edu
- Affiliation
- Columbia University
- Website URL
- https://columbia.academia.edu/DebashreeMukherjee
- Keywords
- film studies, feminist historiography, media studies, Indian cinema, postcolonial studies, cities, labor, production studies, ecology, technology, migration, oceans, Bombay, Bollywood
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I am an Assistant Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. My first academic monograph, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (forthcoming with Columbia University Press), narrates the early history of Indian cinema as a history of material practice. The book investigates the material relations between cinema’s bodies, machines, aesthetics, and environments as they intersect with practices of modernity and freedom in late colonial India. I edit the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, and regularly curate film exhibitions. In a previous life I worked in Mumbai’s film and TV industries as an assistant director, writer, and cameraperson.
For more see: https://mesaas.columbia.edu/faculty-directory/debashree-mukherjee/
- Recent Publications
2020 (forthcoming). Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City, Columbia University Press, Film and Culture series.
2020 (forthcoming). Beyond the Silver Screen: Josef Wirsching and An Unseen History of Indian Cinema, ed. Debashree Mukherjee, New Delhi: Mapin.
2020 (forthcoming). “Somewhere Between Human, Nonhuman, and Woman: Shanta Apte’s Theory of Exhaustion,” Feminist Media Histories, 6(3).
2019. “A Specter Haunts Bombay: Censored Itineraries of a Lost Communistic Film,” Film History, 31(4): 29-59.
2016. “Tracking Utopias: Technology, Labor, and Secularism in Bombay Cinema (1930s-1940s),” in Anupama Rao and Arvind Rajagopal (eds.) Media/Utopia: Imagination, History, Technology, Routledge – Critical Interventions in Theory and Practice, pp. 81-102.
2015. “Scandalous Evidence: Looking for the Bombay Film Actress in an Absent Archive (1930s-1940s),” in Christine Gledhill & Julia Knight (eds.) Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinema’s Past and Future, University of Illinois Press, pp.29-41.
- Media Coverage
- https://www.indulgexpress.com/culture/art/2019/jul/10/this-exhibition-is-critical-to-understand-the-emergence-of-what-we-call-bollywood-today-a-chat-wi-16339.html
- Social Media
- Debashree2017
- Country Focus
- India, Mauritius, Fiji
- Expertise by Geography
- Asia
- Expertise by Chronology
- Modern, 20th century, 21st century
- Expertise by Topic
- Colonialism, Environment, Labor, Material Culture, Migration & Immigration, Technology, Urban History, Women
