Ankita Deb

Ankita Deb is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Media Studies at the Department of Art and Art History, and a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellow at Stanford University. Her dissertation examines unofficial and low-brow media ecologies of sex education between 1973-1999, often discredited as sites of misinformation. She examines these films and their afterlives within a frenetic landscape of development, pleasure, prohibition, sexual science, and popular culture. By paying attention to low-brow films and media her work privileges underhanded and unofficial sexual knowledge cultures as incisive epistemologies of sexuality in their own right, that both co-opted as well as resisted state-sponsored discourses on sexuality and reproductive rights in postcolonial India. She was the graduate student organizer for the Stanford Humanities Workshop series, "Decolonizing Archives, Rethinking Historical Methods (2021-22)," which brought together critical scholarship on precarious, immaterial, and obscure archival histories and methodologies in the fields of South Asian, East Asian, and Southeast Asian studies, along with Black, Caribbean, and Indigenous studies. She is a recipient of the Stanford Asian American Awards (2023) for her outstanding contribution to research and teaching and the Graduate Student Award (2022) in the Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus, at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.