
Usha Iyer
Assistant Professor of Art and Art History
Art & Art History
Bio
Usha Iyer's research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of cinema, performance, and gender and sexuality studies, with a specific focus on film and performance histories, body cultures, and Global South cultural traffic along the vectors of race, gender, caste, and religion.
Iyer 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. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, aesthetic approaches to embodiment, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles," Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Her PhD dissertation, “Film Dance, Female Stardom, and the Production of Gender in Popular Hindi Cinema,” won the University of Pittsburgh's Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program's “Best Dissertation in the Humanities” award.
Iyer’s proposed next book project is an examination of the affective engagements 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. Examining as well the impact of Caribbean cultural forms on the Indian film industry, the project engages with transnational perspectives on race, ethnicity, performance, and migration to produce a multi-sited analysis of the traffic of sensory, embodied forms of knowledge across informal networks between South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Iyer's essays have appeared in Camera Obscura, South Asian Popular Culture, and edited collections such as Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films, Figurations in Indian Film, The Evolution of Song and Dance in Hindi Cinema, Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India, and are forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, The Blackwell Companion to Indian Cinema, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, and the Women Film Pioneers Project, among others.
Iyer is affiliate faculty at Stanford's Center for South Asia and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). She is currently a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and a 2020 CCSRE Faculty Fellow. She was a fellow at The Clayman Institute for Gender Research in 2018-19. Iyer is Associate Editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.
Select publications available at https://stanford.academia.edu/UshaIyer
Academic Appointments
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Assistant Professor, Art & Art History
Administrative Appointments
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Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film and Media Studies Program, Dept of Art and Art History (2017 - Present)
Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations
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Faculty Steering Committee, Center for South Asia (2019 - Present)
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Faculty Steering Committee, Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity (2019 - Present)
Professional Education
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PhD, University of Pittsburgh, Film Studies (2014)
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MA, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, India, Literary and Cultural Studies (2006)
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MA, University of Pune, India, Mass Communication (1996)
Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Film studies, South Asia, Caribbean, Gender, Diaspora, Race and ethnicity
2020-21 Courses
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Independent Studies (12)
- Area Core Examination Preparation
FILMSTUD 620 (Win) - Curricular Practical Training
FILMSTUD 280 (Spr) - Dissertation Proposal Preparation
ARTHIST 640 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Dissertation Research
ARTHIST 650 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Extended Seminar
ARTHIST 660E (Aut, Win, Spr) - Extended Seminar
FILMSTUD 660E (Aut, Win, Spr) - Honors Thesis Writing
FILMSTUD 297 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Independent Study
ARTHIST 660 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Study
FILMSTUD 660 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Independent Study: Film and Media Studies
FILMSTUD 299 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Qualifying Examination Preparation
ARTHIST 620 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Teaching Praxis
ARTHIST 610 (Aut, Win, Spr)
- Area Core Examination Preparation
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Prior Year Courses
2019-20 Courses
- Art History Proseminar
ARTHIST 600A (Win) - History of World Cinema III, 1960-Present
FILMSTUD 100C, FILMSTUD 300C (Spr) - Hollywood/Bollywood: The Musical Two Ways
FILMSTUD 152, FILMSTUD 352 (Spr) - Love in the Time of Cinema
FILMSTUD 137, FILMSTUD 337, GLOBAL 110, GLOBAL 211 (Aut) - The Body in Film and other Media
ARTHIST 448, FILMSTUD 448 (Win)
2018-19 Courses
- History of World Cinema III, 1960-Present
FILMSTUD 100C, FILMSTUD 300C (Spr) - Introduction to Film Study
FILMSTUD 4 (Win) - The Art Cinema of India
FILMSTUD 134, FILMSTUD 334 (Win) - Theories of Melodrama
FILMSTUD 213, FILMSTUD 413 (Spr)
2017-18 Courses
- History of World Cinema III, 1960-Present
FILMSTUD 100C, FILMSTUD 300C (Spr) - Indian Cinema
FILMSTUD 132A, FILMSTUD 332A (Spr) - Introduction to Film Study
FILMSTUD 4 (Aut) - The Body in Film and other Media
FILMSTUD 448 (Win)
- Art History Proseminar
Stanford Advisees
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Doctoral Dissertation Reader (AC)
Suhaila Meera -
Orals Chair
Annika Butler-Wall -
Doctoral Dissertation Advisor (AC)
Ankita Deb
All Publications
- "Bringing Bharatanatyam to Bombay Cinema: Mapping Tamil-Hindi Film Industry Traffic through Vyjayanthimala’s Dancing Body" Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media Routledge. 2020; 1
- Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema Oxford University Press. 2020
- “Dispassionate Repetition and the Enfoldings of History” Chatterjee & Lal Art Gallery. Mumbai, India. 2019 ; Exhibition catalog for the film, Vrindavani Vairagya (Dispassionate Love, Ashish Avikunthak, 2018)
- “Dance Musicalization: Proposing a Choreomusicological Approach to Hindi Film Song-and-dance Sequences.” South Asian Popular Culture 2017; 15 (2-3): 123-138
- "Looking for the Past in Pastiche: Intertextuality in Bollywood Song and Dance Sequences." Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films Equinox Publishing. 2016: 207–226
- "Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai?/What Is behind the Stardom? Madhuri Dixit, the Production Number, and the Construction of the Female Star Text in 1990s Hindi Cinema" Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 2015; 30 (3): 129-159
- "Nevla as Dracula: Figurations of the Tantric as Monster in the Hindi Horror Film" Figurations in Indian Film Palgrave Macmillan. 2013: 101–115