I am a scholar of popular cinema focused on the material life of genres. My work explores the infrastructures that produce moving images, and how viewers experience those infrastructures as expressive screen forms.

My first book, Seeing Things, examines the familiar conventions of horror films for the spectral presence of filmmaking histories. Combining close formal analysis with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, the book uncovers traces of celluloid editing, prosthetic special effects, physical props, location filming, and performing bodies in the desolate mansions, ancient curses, and monstrous phantoms of 1980s Indian horror films. Seeing Things will be published in January 2024 by University of California Press. Early versions of the book’s arguments have appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies as “Unfinished Bodies,” and in the Companion to Indian Cinema as “Scenes of Horror.”

My current research investigates the digital infrastructures of contemporary popular cinema. I am interested in how the sensuous storyworlds of global genres including action, superhero, multiverse, and horror films may mediate VFX software programs, non-linear editing platforms, and virtual reference databases. At the intersection of film art, production studies, speculative realism, media aesthetics, and phenomenological experience, this work develops a felt historiography of visual space as the site where the algorithmic and human agencies of digital cinema become perceptible. Recent essays on greenscreen performance and hyperlinked look-books embedded in action cinema’s mise en scene may be found in Discourse and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

I am an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. I teach a range of graduate and undergraduate courses including seminars on methods and topics, as well as writing-intensive and introductory lecture classes. I am currently collaborating with Karen Redrobe on a coedited volume that explores the changing nature of Cinema and Media Studies through the lens of the classroom.

My public-facing film criticism has appeared in a variety of national and international venues, most recently in a piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books on Scream, film studies, and film franchises. You can also read my work in Film Quarterly, The New Inquiry and India Today.

Prior to joining Temple’s Department of Film and Media Arts, I was a graduate student at New York University, where I earned a PhD in the Department of Cinema Studies. I have an M.Phil. in Cinema Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University and an M.A. in English from Delhi University. I am a core editor of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.