Manishita Dass

Associate Professor (Reader) in Film and Global Media

Postgrduate Research Lead, Media Arts

Director of Impact (Media Arts), 2015-2019

Manishita Dass received her Ph.D. from Stanford University (Modern Thought & Literature/MTL) and before coming to Royal Holloway, worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College in the U.S.

Her research and teaching interests revolve around

• South Asian media and cultural history
• Cultural histories, aesthetic legacies, & affective archives of the left in South Asia
• Global cinemas & leftist cultures
• Approaches to national cinema and world cinema, transnational media flows, & Asian film/media cultures
• Bengali & Hindi cinema
• Intermedial histories & historiography
• Authorship
• Cinephilia
• Cinematic theatricality
• The global formations and geo-political imaginaries of film and modernist studies

Publications

Her first book, Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 2015), traces how the new public space and publics created by cinema were imagined on and especially around the screen -- in films and in contemporary discourses about spectatorship -- in early twentieth century India. These imaginings, the book argues, are crucial clues that can illuminate, if only in flashes, cinema’s role in reshaping the public sphere, the idea of the public, and everyday meanings of modernity in late colonial India.

Outside the Lettered City was recommended by BASAS (British Association for South Asian Studies) as one of their "Top 6 South Asia Studies publications of 2016" (http://basas.org.uk/news-events/calendar/basas-recommended-reads-of-2016/). It was mentioned, in a forum on new approaches to Hollywood history as one of “the best recent histories of movie culture” that “provide a road map for work that could be done on later periods and varied US contexts” (“New Histories of Hollywood Roundtable,” Spectator 38:2, Fall 2018). 

Her subsequent and ongoing research explores the cultural networks, aesthetic legacies, and affective archives of left radicalism and internationalism in South Asia, and  intersections of South Asian leftist and modernist cultures and networks.

One strand of this research has focused on the Bengali-language cinema of Ritwik Ghatak, widely considered to be one of the most original, politically committed, and formally innovative filmmakers from India, e.g.: 

• ·       An essay on cinematic theatricality in Screen (2017)
• ·       A chapter on Ghatak in the edited collection Global Art Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2011)
• ·       An essay in Global Circulations of Film Theory (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press) that explores the relationship between film practice and film theory through Ghatak’s cinematic practice
• ·       A book on what is arguably Ghatak’s best-known film, The Cloud-Capped Star/Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), for the BFI Film Classics series (Bloomsbury, 2020).

e    Her book on Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star) was one of the publications that marked the re-launching of the BFI Film Classics series in 2020 with a brief to "challenge and broaden the film Canon to better represent the diversity of film history and culture" in their newly commissioned titles (https://bit.ly/2AQRtvg).

This book draws on extensive archival research, a wide range of theoretical insights, and an array of Bengali language primary sources to the situate the film in its social, cultural and artistic contexts, connect it to Ghatak's theatrical work and writings on film and theatre, and move away from narrowly auteurist readings by highlighting the crucial role of Ghatak's collaborators. It also offers a fresh perspective on the film's modernist experiments with melodrama, realism, and myth, and on the concept of cinematic theatricality.

Work in Progress

She is currently working on a book about the transformative impact of left radicalism on the film cultures of Bombay and Calcutta in the 1940s-1960s (Left Luggage: Cinematic Afterlives of the Indian People's Theatre Association). Research for this project has been supported by a British Academy grant (to do archival research) and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2019-2020).

She and Dr Usha Iyer (Stanford University) are co-editing 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.

This volume emerged out of two seminars co-organized with Dr Iyer: a 2-day, 22-paper seminar, "New Perspectives on the Indian New Wave," at the ACLA/American Comparative Literature Association conference, March 2020, and another seminar, "Refracting Global Art and Political Cinema through the Lens of the Indian New Wave," at the 2020 SCMS conference (April).

Another ongoing project focuses on the possibilities of intermediality as historiographic method, especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts: How do we fashion historiographic approaches attuned to the specificity of a medium as well as its relations with other media?  How do we trace the transnational networks, flows, exchanges, and interventions through which medium-specific trends take shape across media? She has organized panels on these issues at various international conferences: SCMS/Society for Cinema & Media Studies (2018, 2019); Screen (2017).

Other activities

She is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the University of California Press’ new Cinema Cultures in Contact series, dedicated to publishing scholarly monographs on cinematic flows and exchanges across borders: https://www.ucpress.edu/series/ccc/cinema-cultures-in-contact.

She is interested in making academic research accessible to a wider public, and has welcomed opportunities to work with the BFI (British Film Institute) in this context (e.g., delivering an hour-long season introduction to the BFI’s major retrospective of Satyajit Ray’s films in August 2013, and a public-facing workshop on Ritwik Ghatak’s film practice in February 2024) and other cultural organizations (e.g., Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, & Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, Frankfurt).

Between 2007 and 2010, she was one of the principal project coordinators of Tasveer Ghar (House of Pictures), a multi-institutional and transnational initiative (based at the University of Michigan, Duke University, University of Heidelberg, and the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi) for creating a virtual archive of South Asian popular visual culture through collecting, digitizing, and contextualizing a wide variety of images and visual artifacts, e.g., posters, cinema advertisements, photographs, calendar art, and other forms of street/bazaar art (www.tasveergharindia.net).