Ankita Deb is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Media Studies at the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Her dissertation titled, "Cinema, Sexology, and Soft Porn: The Enduring Ecologies of Sex Education in India" traces the centrality of media technologies in sexual pedagogy, and argues that these media apparatuses not only function as significant sites of sexual imagination, but are complex systems of knowledge unto themselves, that demonstrate how sex is learned, unlearned, taught, consumed, and imagined primarily through low genres.
Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the Steven and Debi Wisch Fellowship for Graduate Research in South Asian Studies. In 2023, she received the Vice Provost for Graduate Education Teaching and Research Award from the Stanford Asian American Activities Center. And in 2022, she was honored with the Graduate Student Award from the Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Ankita co-organized the graduate student conference The Erotic at the Center for South Asia in 2021, which explored the politics of everyday intimacies through queer and feminist perspectives in South Asia. She also co-curated a year long Stanford Humanities Workshop Series Decolonizing Archives, Rethinking Historical Methods (2021–22), which convened scholarship on precarious, immaterial, and obscure archival histories and methodologies across South Asian, East Asian, and Southeast Asian studies, as well as Black, Caribbean, and Indigenous studies.
Her writing has appeared in Feminist Media Histories and is forthcoming in South Asian Review and in the edited volume Shift Focus: Reframing the Indian New Waves (Oxford University Press).