Usha Iyer
Associate 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 (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
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Associate 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
2024-25 Courses
- Graduate Pedagogy
ARTHIST 405A (Win) - Humanities Research Intensive
ENGLISH 9R (Spr) - Introduction to Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
CSRE 100 (Spr) - Introduction to Film Study
FILMEDIA 4 (Win) - Migrant Media in New York City
SINY 15 (Aut) -
Independent Studies (14)
- Curricular Practical Training
ARTHIST 680 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Curricular Practical Training
FILMEDIA 680 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Dissertation Proposal Preparation
ARTHIST 640 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Dissertation Research
ARTHIST 650 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Extended Seminar
ARTHIST 660E (Aut, Win, Spr) - Extended Seminar
FILMEDIA 660E (Aut, Win, Spr) - Films & Media Studies Internship
FILMEDIA 295 (Spr) - Honors Thesis Writing
FILMEDIA 297 (Spr) - Independent Study
ARTHIST 660 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Independent Study
FILMEDIA 660 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Independent Study: Film and Media Studies
FILMEDIA 299 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Qualifying Examination Preparation
ARTHIST 620 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Qualifying Examination Preparation
FILMEDIA 620 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Teaching Praxis
ARTHIST 610 (Aut, Win, Spr)
- Curricular Practical Training
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Prior Year Courses
2023-24 Courses
- Close Cinematic Analysis: Being John Wayne
ASNAMST 108, FEMGEN 104, FILMEDIA 101, FILMEDIA 301, TAPS 101F (Aut) - Decolonial Approaches to African Arts
FILMEDIA 214 (Spr) - Decolonization and Decoloniality: Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy
ARTHIST 460, FILMEDIA 460, TAPS 460 (Spr) - Decolonizing African Arts in Nairobi
OSPGEN 64 (Sum) - History of World Cinema III: Queer Cinemas around the World
CSRE 102C, CSRE 302C, FEMGEN 100C, FEMGEN 300C, FILMEDIA 100C, FILMEDIA 300C, GLOBAL 193, GLOBAL 390, TAPS 100C, TAPS 300C (Spr) - Humanities Research Intensive
ENGLISH 9R (Spr) - Introduction to Film Study
FILMEDIA 4 (Aut) - The Mindy Kaling Cinematic Universe
ASNAMST 12SI (Spr)
2022-23 Courses
- Close Cinematic Analysis - Caste, Sexuality, and Religion in Indian Media
ARTHIST 199, FEMGEN 104, FILMEDIA 101, FILMEDIA 301 (Spr) - Decolonizing Theory
ARTHIST 460, FILMEDIA 460 (Win) - History of World Cinema III: Queer Cinemas around the World
ARTHIST 164, ARTHIST 364, CSRE 102C, CSRE 302C, FEMGEN 100C, FILMEDIA 100C, FILMEDIA 300C, GLOBAL 193, GLOBAL 390, TAPS 100C, TAPS 300C (Spr)
2021-22 Courses
- Graduate Workshop: Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Queer Cinemas around the World)
FEMGEN 299 (Spr) - History of World Cinema III: Queer Cinema around the World
ARTHIST 164, ARTHIST 364, CSRE 102C, CSRE 302C, FEMGEN 100C, FILMEDIA 100C, FILMEDIA 300C, GLOBAL 193, GLOBAL 390, TAPS 100C, TAPS 300C (Spr)
- Close Cinematic Analysis: Being John Wayne
Stanford Advisees
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Doctoral Dissertation Reader (AC)
Linden Hill, Delaney Holton, Meagan Khoury, Seyi Osundeko, Adin Walker -
Doctoral Dissertation Advisor (AC)
Ankita Deb -
Doctoral (Program)
Dineo Maine
All Publications
- "Smuggling, Infiltrating, Usurping: Why Globalizing the Film and Media Studies Curriculum is Essential to Decolonizing It." The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 2022; 61 (6)
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A Pedagogy of Reparations Notes toward Repairing the Film and Media Studies Curriculum
FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES
2022; 8 (1): 181-193
View details for DOI 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.181
View details for Web of Science ID 000779073500008
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Song-and-Dance Sequence
BIOSCOPE-SOUTH ASIAN SCREEN STUDIES
2021; 12 (1-2): 174-177
View details for DOI 10.1177/09749276211026051
View details for Web of Science ID 000730712900041
- "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