Usha Iyer's research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of cinema, performance, and gender and sexuality studies, with a specific focus on Global South cultural traffic along the vectors of race, gender, caste, and religion.
Iyer (she/they) is the author of Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020), which examines constructions of gender, stardom, sexuality, and spectacle in Hindi cinema through women’s labor, collaborative networks, and gestural genealogies to produce a corporeal history of South Asian cultural modernities. The book was awarded the British Association of South Asian Studies Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research by the Dance Studies Association.
Iyer’s current book project, Jammin’: Black and Brown Media Intimacies between India and the Caribbean (under contract with Columbia University Press), studies the deep affective engagement of Caribbean spectators with Indian cinema in relation to discourses of belonging and citizenship that have developed around the histories of African enslavement and Indian indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, and Guyana. The book equally attends to the impact of Caribbean cultural forms on Indian film industries. Spanning film, radio, television, and digital media, this multi-sited project engages with crucial questions of racial, religious, gender, and caste frictions and solidarities across locations that are not often studied alongside each other. Iyer is co-curator of the open-access colloquy, Black and Brown Intimacies Across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.
Iyer is co-editing with Manishita Dass the volume, Shift Focus: Reframing the Indian New Waves (under contract with Oxford University Press). This anthology brings together a diverse group of scholars to examine the unexplored cultural, political, and aesthetic genealogies, impulses, and resonances of the Indian New Waves.
Iyer's essays have appeared in journals like Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Histories, South Asian Popular Culture, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, as well as in anthologies and edited collections, including, The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, A Companion to Indian Cinema, Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India, Figurations in Indian Film, among others. Iyer is Associate Editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and serves on the editorial board of Film History.
Access to selected publications: https://stanford.academia.edu/UshaIyer
Iyer serves as faculty director of Stanford's Center for South Asia. They are affiliate faculty in the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Their research has been supported by fellowships from The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, Stanford Humanities Center, Clayman Institute of Gender Research, among others. They were an Annenberg Faculty Fellow, School of the Humanities and Sciences (2022-2024).
Courses
Queer Cinemas around the World; Caste, Sexuality, and Religion in Indian Media; Decolonizing Theory; Decolonization and Decoloniality: Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy; Intimacies as Method: Studying Black and Brown Relation; Gender & Performance; The Body in Film and other Media; Global Melodrama; Love in the Time of Cinema; Art Cinemas of India; Hollywood/Bollywood; Revisiting the Indian New Wave: Infrastructures & Ideologies of Art Cinema in the Postcolony.
