Esha Niyogi De

Esha Niyogi De has a Ph.D. and a Masters in English, respectively, from Purdue University and Clark University in the USA, and an undergraduate degree from Jadavpur University in India. She specializes in teaching academic writing and rhetoric with an emphasis on cinema, gender, and performance. She is the author of Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman:  A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought (Oxford Univ. Press) and the co-editor and co-author of Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia (Duke Univ. Press).   Her articles have appeared in leading international journals–such as Screen and diacritics–and in other scholarly journals and books published in the US, India, Bangladesh, and Australia. She is a regular peer reviewer for a range of academic journals appearing in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and for such presses as Oxford, Duke, Palgrave MacMillan.

About a year ago, Dr. De received a Senior Fulbright Multi-country Research grant (2013-2014) to Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Based on the research she conducted on women filmmakers in these countries, she is writing a new single-author book. Moreover, she is drawing on the academic contacts she established in these countries in the course of her Fulbright travels to build a transnational research cluster called the South Asia Media Scholars Network n(SAMSNet). The objective of this cluster is collaborative research and publication on media that cross borders and work against nationalist and religious orthodoxies.  Supported by another grant she recently received from the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (2015-2016), she is co-organizing a SAMSNet conference in Lahore, Pakistan. A subsequent SAMSNet conference will be co-convened by her in India in 2017. Dr. De has also served as a Core Member of the US Fulbright South Central Asia Peer Review Panel for the Commissions to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the SCA Region.