Dr. Sangita Gopal
April 16, 2015—Dr. Sangita Gopal, whose research, as she describes it, “is located at the intersection of feminist media studies, postcolonial studies and globalization,” has been chosen for a two-year term as associate director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon starting in Fall 2015. An associate professor in the UO Department of English and the Cinema Studies Program, Dr. Gopal has been teaching at UO since 2004. Dr. Gopal is the author of Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), which “explored how cinema reimagined its representations of marriage in order to register shifts in gender identity and social relations activated by the socio-economic processes of globalization.”
Her current book project grew out of her ongoing collaboration with a scholarly collective that researches transnational women’s cinema in conferences and workshops at various global locations. Entitled Between State and Capital: Women Make Movies, this book “examines the constellation of forces that enabled the rise of woman filmmakers in India. Based on archival research and extensive interviews with these media pioneers, the project suggests that the emergence of a state-owned new media – television – on the one hand and a new emphasis on part of the feminist movement on questions of identity and representation created the horizon of possibility for women’s media work.”
Both book projects have been supported by CSWS faculty research grants. But more importantly, says Dr. Gopal, “CSWS through its research interest groups, Women of Color Project and various events has allowed me over the years to enter into and learn from conversations with a broader community of feminist scholars working in various fields both within the university and outside it. It has provided networking opportunities as well as intellectual camaraderie, feedback and mentoring. My work but also my life here would not have been possible without this support.”
Dr. Gopal also co-edited the books Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (with Sujata Moorti; University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and Intermedia in South Asia: The Fourth Screen (with Rajinder Dudrah, Anustup Basu and Amit Rai; Routledge, 2012).
Dr. Gopal grew up in Kolkata, India, and moved to the United States to attend graduate school at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, where she studied literary theory and film studies. Attracted to theater, she was active as an actress and director in college, and in between finishing up coursework for her PhD and writing her dissertation, took three years off to manage an off-off Broadway troupe in New York.
