People

People

  • Meheli Sen
  • Meheli Sen
  • Associate Professor, South Asian and Global Cinemas
  • Phone: 848-445-4302
  • Room #: 6170
  • Office address: 15 Seminary Place. College Avenue Campus
  • Education:

    Meheli Sen received her Ph.D. from Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts in 2008, with a certificate in Film Studies. Prior to this, she received a B.A. in Comparative Literature in 1997 and an M.A. in Film Studies in 1999 at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India.

    Sen has previously taught at the University of Oklahoma’s Film and Media Studies Program and in the College of Communication at DePaul University.
  • Areas of Research/Interest:

    Her research area is post-independence Indian cinema, particularly Hindi and Bengali language films. She is especially interested in questions of gender, genre, modernity, globalization, and new media cultures. Her work has been published in journals such as Cinema Journal, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, South Asian Popular Culture, among others. She has co-edited an anthology titled Figurations in Indian Film (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013).

  • Sen’s book, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema (University of Texas Press and Orient BlackSwan, 2017) explores the supernatural in Bollywood cinema, and the varied modes through which it raises questions of film form, history, modernity, and gender in South Asian public cultures. Arguing that the supernatural is dispersed among multiple genres and constantly in conversation with global cinematic forms, she demonstrates that it is an especially malleable impulse that routinely pushes the Hindi popular film into new formal and stylistic territories.

    Professor Sen is currently working on a second book on media cultures in South Asia.

     

    Selected Publications:

     "Rocking in Kasba: “band” Music, Contemporary Bengali Cinema, and Anjan Dutta’s Lost Kolkatas," South Asian History and Culture, Special Issue: Western Popular Music and the Making of Indian modernity, ed. Bish Sen, October, 2024.

    “SRK qua Kintsugi: Reflections on the ‘Aging Action Star’” in Pathaan: A Dossier, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, Vol 14, Issue 2, December 2023.

    “Unmaking Bollywood: Style, Gender, and Sexuality in Made in Heaven” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 61, Fall 2022.

    “Contemporary Bengali Cinema: Reflexivity, Nostalgia, and the Ghosts of Satyajit Ray,” in A Companion to Indian Cinema, eds. Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, August 2022), 260-280.

    Masaan (2015), Lexicon of Global Melodrama, ed. by Heike Paul, Sarah Marak, Katharina Gerund, & Marius Henderson (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag; New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 343-346.

    “Prosit Roy’s Pari: Bollywood Horror,” Horror: A Companion, ed. Simon Bacon (New York: Peter Lang, June 2019), 181-189.

    “Undoing Style, Repurposing Friendship,” in Lust Stories: A Dossier, Film Quarterly, April 2019.

    “The Mirror of Desire: Queerness, Fan, and the Riddles of Paheli.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 58, No. 1-2 (Spring/Fall 2017), pp. 173-186.

     “Bombay Talkies and the Indian Cinema Centenary.” South Asian Popular Culture, Working Notes: Dossier on the Centenary of Indian Cinema, ed. Anupama Kapse, 13, No. 1 (2015): 77-80.

    “From Dostana to Bromance: Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered,” in Film and Television Bromance: Culture, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Michael DeAngelis (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 139-164.

    “Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes: Undoing Modernity in Recent Bollywood Cinema,” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Volume 22, Issue 3, 2011, 197-217.

    “‘It’s All About Loving Your Parents’: Hindutva, Liberalization and Bollywood’s New Patriarch” in Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora ed. by Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari

    Pandharipande, London: Anthem Press, 2010, 145-168.
  • Courses:

    Bollywood

    Cinemas of Africa and Asia

    Literature and Cinema in South Asia

    Crossroads: Classical Literatures of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia