Usha Iyer to lead Stanford’s South Asia Center

Indian American professor’s research and teaching examine film and media cultures in relation to gender, sexuality, race, and caste

By Arun Kumar

India-born Usha Iyer, associate professor of film and media studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, is set to lead its Center for South Asia in 2025-26 academic year this fall.

Iyer’s research and teaching examine film and media cultures in relation to gender, sexuality, race, and caste. Her book, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema(Oxford University Press, 2020), is a study of women’s labor and collaboration, according to her profile.

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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, studies the affective engagements of Caribbean spectators with Indian cinema and the impact of Caribbean performance cultures on Indian film industries.

Spanning film, radio, television, and digital media, this multi-generational, and multi-sited (moving between India, the Caribbean, and Caribbean diasporas in North America) 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 also 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.

Iyer serves as affiliate faculty in Stanford’s Center for South Asia, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program.

Her 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. She was an Annenberg Faculty Fellow, School of the Humanities and Sciences (2022-2024).

With a PhD from University of Pittsburgh, Iyer did her MA, Literary and Cultural Studies, from CIEFL, Hyderabad and MA, Communication Studies from University of Pune. She did her BA, Literature at St. Xaviers College, Bombay.