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" 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. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and The Steven and Debi Wisch Fellowship for Graduate Research in South Asian Studies.
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. Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Histories journal and is upcoming in South Asian Review and in an edited volume (Oxford University Press).