Usha Iyer

Bio

Usha Iyer is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of cinema, performance, and gender studies with a specific focus on stardom, body cultures, spectatorial desire and engagement, and the political economy of transnational media.

Her current book project, The Dancing Heroine: Choreographing Gender in Popular Hindi Cinema (under contract with Oxford University Press), examines the role of dance in the construction of female stardom in popular Hindi cinema from the 1930s to the 1990s, theorizing and historicizing film dance, a staple “attraction” of the popular Indian film form, in relation to the construction of cinematic narratives, star bodies, and spectator-citizens. In recent articles and conference presentations, she examines dance, comedy, and action as performative modes involved in the presentation of the male body as spectacle. This attention to varied modes of performance is directed towards understanding cultural paradigms for performing gender, and producing a critical genealogy of popular cultural forms and trans-regional exchanges through the performing body.

Other areas of research include performance traditions of the Indian indentured labor diaspora in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.

Dr. Iyer is an affiliate faculty of Stanford's Center for South Asia, and a faculty fellow at The Clayman Institute for Gender Research in 2018-19.

Academic Appointments

• Assistant Professor, Art & Art History

Administrative Appointments

• Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film and Media Studies Program (2017 - Present)

Professional Education

• PhD, University of Pittsburgh, Film Studies (2014)
• MA, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, India, Literary and Cultural Studies (2006)
• MA, University of Pune, India, Mass Communication (1996)