Neepa Majumdar

Neepa Majumdar is Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s to 1950s (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Her research interests include film sound, star studies, South Asian early cinema, and documentary film. She is co-editor of the journals [In]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.

Her research tracks the transmutations that occur in such seemingly self-evident ideas as “stardom” and “aurality” as a way to remap the specificities of locally grounded cinematic cultures in early twentieth century India, where the nationalist project remained firmly in conversation with Hollywood and international cinemas. Her current book project, on cinematic and extra-cinematic audio cultures, focuses on the period just before and after the transition to sound in Indian cinema, with an interest in mapping the transition itself as a gradual shift in sonic cultures that extended before and after the pivotal date of 1931, the official coming of sound to Indian cinema.