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Sangita Gopal

Sangita Gopal profile picture
  • Affiliation: faculty, student
  • Title: Associate Professor of English
  • Phone: 541-346-5524
  • Office: 103 PLC
  • Affiliated Departments: English
  • Interests: Postcolonial Theory and Literature, South Asian Visual and Cultural Studies

Education

Ph.D., University of Rochester, 2000

Statement

My teaching and research interests are in the areas of cinema studies, comparative media studies, postcolonial theory and feminist studies. I have particular expertise in South Asian cinema and literature. I supervise doctoral students in the areas of cinema studies, postcolonial studies, gender theory, and south asian media studies.

My recent monograph Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema examines the radical transformations that Hindi popular cinema has undergone since the 1990s - a decade associated with India's globalization.What I call "New Bollywood" is a formation both allied to and distinct from the various "new waves" that have emerged in global cinemas in the last few decades. Arguing that the couple form has served in Hindi cinema as an efficient figure for understanding how cinema and its institutions conjugate with the social world, I show how the re-figurations of the couple in New Bollywood cinema articulates with key shifts in the industrial organization, exhibition infrastructure, generic logic and social life of cinema in India. I have co-edited anthologies on the global travels of Bollywood film music and Intermedia in South Asia.

Currently, I am working on two book projects.

The first studies cinema in an intermedial domain that includes TV. Provisionally entitled, Between State and Capital: Hindi Cinema in Transition, looks at the transactions between the Hindi film industry and the state-owned television in India in the 1970s and 80s to understand the role state-sponsored television played in the emergence of New Bollywood cinema.

The second, entitled A Cinema of Friendship: Transnational Film Production and the Social Network, focuses on the decades-long collaboration of James Ivory, Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to examine how informal affiliations and affective ties create an independent, transnational production model that functions outside the state-based, neo-colonialist co-production matrix that c the cinema of newly-decolonized nations in the 1950s and 1960s.

Publications

Books and Edited Volumes:

Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo12120811.html

http://www.amazon.com/Conjugations-Marriage-Bollywood-Cinema-Disciplines/dp/0226304264

Intermedia in South Asia: The Fourth Screen. Co-edited with Rajinder Dudrah, Anustup Basu and Amit Rai. (Routledge, 2012)

Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Film Music. Co-edited with Sujata Moorti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Published in Asia by Orient Blackswan in 2010.  Reviewed in Jump Cut, Journal of Asian Music, Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, Global Asian Music, Journal of International Communications, Senses of Cinema, Cultural Dynamics etc 

http://www.amazon.com/Global-Bollywood-Travels-Hindi-Dance/dp/0816645795/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335204837&sr=1-1

 Recent Articles:

“Between Media: Rethinking Adaptation in Bengali Cinema.” Comparative Literature, forthcoming, Spring, 2012. (10,855 words)

“Singin’ in the Rain: Conjugality and Hindi Film Form.” Feminist Studies, 37.1 (Spring, 2011): 154-180

“Bollywood in Drag: Moulin Rouge and the Aesthetics of Global Cinema.” Co-author, Sujata Moorti. Camera Obscura 75, 25:3: 29-67

“Sentimental Symptoms: The Films of Karan Johar and Bombay Cinema.” in Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora, Eds. Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari Pandharipande (London, New York, New Delhi: Anthem Press, 2010), 15-34.

 “Introduction.” Co-author, Sujata Moorti. Global Bollywood: Transnational Travels of Hindi Film Music, Eds. Sangita Gopal and Sujata  Moorti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1-60.

"Engines of Desire: Song and Dance in Bollywood Cinema.” Co-author, Bish Sen. The Bollywood Reader, Eds. Jigna Desai and Rajinder Dudrah (London: Open University Press, 2008), 146-168

“The Look in Ruins: Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and the Dialectics of Seeing.” South Asian Review 26: 1(2005), 338-358.

"Hindu Being, Hindu Buying: Hindutva Online and the Commodity Logic of Late Nationalism.” South Asian Review 24: 1(2003), 161-179

“Sex Outside: Postcoloniality and Ethnosexual Queerness.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 10: 1(2003): 11-33.