Wesleyan portrait of Anuja  Jain

Anuja Jain

Assistant Professor of Film Studies

Center for Film Studies Complex Room 158, 305 Washington Terrace
860-685-3933

Assistant Professor, Global South Asian Studies

Center for Film Studies Complex Room 158, 305 Washington Terrace
860-685-3933

ajain01@wesleyan.edu

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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 Global South Asian Studies, 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 video installation in India, 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 of video installations, media technologies, memory, trauma and South Asian studies.

Her scholarship has been supported by 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. 

She also regularly participates in various conversations with industry practioners, and archivists. Most recently, she has been an invited participant to the South Asian Production Designers Roundtable during the International Production Design Week, and a discussant in a panel on the future of the South Asian Cinema Collection at George Eastman Museum. 

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

On sabbatical for the academic year 2024-2025.