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 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. This 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-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.

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).

More information on publications at: https://stanford.academia.edu/UshaIyer

Academic Appointments

  • Associate Professor, Art & Art History

Administrative Appointments

  • Faculty director, Stanford Center for South Asia (2025 - Present)
  • Area head, Film and Media Studies (2023 - Present)
  • Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film and Media Studies Program, Dept of Art and Art History (2017 - 2020)

Honors & Awards

  • “Inspiring Early Academic Career Award”, Stanford Faculty Women’s Forum (2023)

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)

Links

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

Film studies, South Asia, Caribbean, Gender, Diaspora, Race and ethnicity

2025-26 Courses

Stanford Advisees

All Publications

  • Gender Hauntings at the Border: <i>Qissa</i>'s Narration of Partition Through the Trans Body BIOSCOPE-SOUTH ASIAN SCREEN STUDIES Iyer, U. 2025

    View details for DOI 10.1177/09749276251380901

    View details for Web of Science ID 001603234200001

  • Writing Film History without Films: Song Booklets and an Archival Hermeneutic of Speculation JCMS-JOURNAL OF CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES Iyer, U. 2024; 63 (5)

    View details for DOI 10.1353/cj.2023.a941833

    View details for Web of Science ID 001460037100002

  • "Smuggling, Infiltrating, Usurping: Why Globalizing the Film and Media Studies Curriculum is Essential to Decolonizing It." The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Iyer, U. 2022; 61 (6)
  • A Pedagogy of Reparations Notes toward Repairing the Film and Media Studies Curriculum FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES Iyer, U. 2022; 8 (1): 181-193

    View details for DOI 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.181

    View details for Web of Science ID 000779073500008

  • Song-and-Dance Sequence BIOSCOPE-SOUTH ASIAN SCREEN STUDIES Iyer, U. 2021; 12 (1-2): 174-177

    View details for DOI 10.1177/09749276211026051

    View details for Web of Science ID 000730712900041

  • Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema Iyer, U. Oxford University Press. 2020
  • "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 Iyer, U. Routledge. 2020; 1
  • “Dispassionate Repetition and the Enfoldings of History” Iyer, U. 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 Iyer, U. 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 Iyer, U. 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 Iyer, U. 2015; 30 (3): 129-159
  • "Nevla as Dracula: Figurations of the Tantric as Monster in the Hindi Horror Film" Figurations in Indian Film Iyer, U. Palgrave Macmillan. 2013: 101–115