Usha Iyer

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 (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. 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. The book was awarded the British Association of South Asian Studies (BASAS) Book Prize.

Iyer’s 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, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, and edited collections such as Figurations in Indian Film, The Evolution of Song and Dance in Hindi Cinema, Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India, Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films, and are forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, The Blackwell Companion to Indian Cinema, among others. Iyer is Associate Editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

Iyer is affiliate faculty in Stanford's Center for South Asia, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), and in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) program. She is a 2021-22 FGSS faculty fellow, and her research has been supported by fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the Clayman Institute of Gender Research, CCSRE, and Stanford Global Studies.

Academic Appointments

• Assistant Professor, Art & Art History

Administrative Appointments

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

Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations

• Faculty Steering Committee, Center for South Asia (2019 - Present)
• Faculty Steering Committee, Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity (2019 - 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)