Wesleyan portrait of Anuja  Jain

Anuja Jain

Assistant Professor of Film Studies

Center for Film Studies, 152
860-685-3933

Assistant Professor, Global South Asian Studies

ajain01@wesleyan.edu

BA University of Delhi
MA University of Delhi
PHD New York University

Anuja Jain

Anuja Jain's research and teaching revolves around South Asian film, media and visual culture. She is also an affiliate faculty in South Asia Studies Minor, and in addition to courses on South Asian cinema, she teaches specialised electives on city films in Asia, global film melodrama and an international survey of women's contributions to cinema. She is the co-editor of the dossier, The Poetics of Indian Cinema (Screen). Her essays have appeared in journals and anthologies like The Velvet Light Trap, South Asian Popular Culture, MARG, Screen, Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood, Blackwell Companion to Indian Cinema, InterMedia in South Asia: The Fourth Screen, Narratives of Indian Cinema, and The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media

She is completing a monograph that is the first book length study of independent documentary film and multimedia installation in India that focuses on the genocidal religious violence mobilized by the Hindu right-wing, 1990s - 2000s. The book interrogates the radical and ethical implications of linkages of crisis, documentary, new media art practices and spectatorship within the non-western, South Asian and postcolonial framework. The project has a resounding global resonance, and contributes to the fields of transnational documentary studies, non western histories and genealogies of contemporary new media art, media technologies, memory studies, South Asian studies, and postcolonial and trauma theory. She has organised panels on this project and these issues at SCMS (Society for Cinema & Media Studies). 

Professor Jain is the recipient of fellowships from American Institute of Indian Studies, Chao Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rice University, and more recently, a visiting fellowship at the King's India Institute, King's College London. 

She is also working on a second research project on reuse and recycling of the past in contemporary Indian cinema, and has presented from this project at conferences like SCMS and Screen. 

Anuja earned her B.A., M.A. and M.Phil. in English from University of Delhi, India followed by a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University. 

Academic Affiliations

Office Hours

Fall 2023

Wednesday, 3-4 pm; Thursday, 3.30 - 4.30 pm  (By appointment). 

To sign up for office hours, please visit my Calendly page: https://calendly.com/professorjain/15min

Courses

Fall 2023
FILM 290 - 01
Global Film Melodrama

FILM 397 - 01
Cinema and City

Spring 2024
FILM 329 - 01
Indian Cinema