Department of Media and Communication Studies - Savitribai Phule Pune University

International Conference - Contemporary Indian Cinema: Contestations and Consolidations

7th - 9th February, 2019

National Film Archive of India, Pune

Abstract Submission | Registration Form

Department of Media and Communication Studies, Savitribai Phule Pune University is organizing a three day International conference on the theme - Contemporary Indian Cinema: Contestations and Consolidations (CCC2019). The conference aims to intervene in key debates on ‘Indian Cinema’ within the scholarship of media studies by turning a critical lens on Indian cinema of the new millennium i.e. post 2000. It proposes to examine its aesthetic, cultural, political and technological underpinnings. We endeavour to explore the problematic associated with its definition, and examine the various currents and counter currents that exist in Indian Cinema from the turn of the new millennium.

Speakers for the Conference

	Dr. Tejaswini Ganti is Associate Professor of Anthropology and core faculty in the Program in Culture & Media at New York University. She has been conducting research about the social world and filmmaking practices of the Hindi film industry since 1996 and is the author of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Duke University Press 2012) and Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004; 2nd edition 2013). Her current research examines the politics of language and translation within the Hindi film industry; the formalization and professionalization of film training through film schools in India; and a social history of Indian cinema in the U.S. She is currently writing a book, Thinking in English, Speaking in Hindi: Media, Multilingualism, and Translation in Mumbai, which is an ethnographic study of multilingualism and translation within the Bombay film world.
	Shakuntala Banaji, PhD, is Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies and programme director for the MSc in Media, Communication and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She lectures in development and communication, international media and world cinema, and is the winner of the fourth European Prize for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Diener Prize (2015), awarded by Central European University in Hungary. She has participated in several large cross-European projects on young people, media, new technologies, schooling anddemocratic participation between 2006 and 2018 and is currently UK project director of a multi-country Horizon 2020 project, CATCH-EyoU on youth active citizenship in Europe (2015-2018) and Principle Investigator for a collaborative grant with American University Sharjah on young people’s participatory culture, the internet and creative production in the Middle East (2015-2018) as well as leader of one of 20 WhatsApp grants for investigating the spread of mediated misinformation amongst publics in India (2018-2019). Her books include Reading Bollywood (Palgrave 2006/2011), South Asian Media Cultures, (Anthem Press, 2011); The Civic Web: Young people, the Internet and civic participation jointly authored with David Buckingham (MIT Press, 2013), Young People and Democratic Life co-authored with Bart Cammaerts et al (Palgrave, 2015) and Children and Media in India (Routledge, 2017).
	S.V. Srinivas is professor at the School of Liberal Studies, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. He has been associated with the Bengaluru-based Centre for the Study of the Culture and Society in various capacities since 1998 and is now one of its trustees. His research focuses on the intersections between popular culture and mass politics. He is currently working on Telugu and Tamil language blockbusters. He is the author of Megastar (OUP, 2009) and Politics as Performance (Permanent Black, 2013). He is also the co-editor of a two volume collection of essays titled The Indian Media Economy (OUP, 2018).
	M. Madhava Prasad is Professor of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. He is the author of Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (1998), Cine-politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India (2014) and essays on the culture, society and politics of modern India. At present he is completing a project on the history and politics of languages in India and working on a collaborative project on the contemporary independent cinemas of India.
	Richard Allen is Chair-Professor of Film and Media Art and Dean of the School of Creative Media, Hong Kong. He was formerly Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. His research interests are in film theory and the philosophy of film, film aesthetics and poetics, and melodrama. His books include Projecting Illusion (1995), Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony (2007), and Muslim Cultures of Bombay Cinema (2009), written with Ira Bhaskar. He recently published an article on “The Passion of Christ and the Melodramatic Imagination,” and he is completing a book called Bollywood Poetics.
	Dr. Swarnavel Eswaran is Professor of Film Studies and Film Production in the English and MI (Media and Information) Departments at Michigan State University and his research focuses on the history, theory, and production of documentaries, and the specificity of Tamil cinema, and its complex relationship with Hollywood as well as popular Hindi films. His recent books are Cinema: Sattagamum Saalaramum (Nizhal, 2013), an anthology of essays on documentaries and experimental films in Tamil and Madras Studios: Narrative, Genre, and Ideology in Tamil Cinema (Sage Publications, 2015). He is a graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India, the premier film school in Asia, and the prestigious film studies program at the University of Iowa. He is an accomplished filmmaker, and his recent documentaries include Tsunami: Waves from the Deep (2018), Hmong Memories at the Crossroad (2016), Migrations of Islam (2014), and Unfinished Journey: A City in Transition (2012).