Swapnil Rai

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Swapnil Rai works at the intersection of media studies, critical cultural communication, women's and gender studies, and industry studies. Focusing on the global south, she investigates how transnational networked cultures intersect with the media industries and with questions of policy, geopolitics, and audiences.

Her award-winning first book Networked Bollywood: How Star Power Globalized Hindi Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2024) received wide journalistic coverage in multiple countries, including the United States, India, and China. Networked Bollywood unearths the oft-elided history of Bollywood’s globalization, illustrating how India’s prominent stars directed the globalization of the world’s largest entertainment industry despite filmmaking not being recognized as an official industry for the first hundred years of the industry’s history. The book illustrates how, over the decades, a handful of primarily male megastars, as the heads of the industry's most prominent productions and corporations, combined overwhelming charismatic affect with unparalleled business influence.

Her second co-authored book, Transnational Streaming Television Reshaping Global Flows and Power recently published by Routledge examines the impact of streaming on the global production and flow of television and film, and provides an innovative theoretical framework to understand how asymmetric dynamics of power play out in the era of streaming.

Based on her exemplary mentorship, she was awarded the Outstanding Mentor Award by the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program at the University of Michigan. She has served in various leadership roles for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), including several special interest groups and SCMS committees, such as the professional development and graduate awards committees. She currently serves as the cochair of the SCMS Media Industries SIG. She is also a board member for Console-ing Passions and multiple scholarly journals.

Dr. Rai earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Radio, TV, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin.  She also served as a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and taught at the College of Film and the Moving Image at Wesleyan University. In her prior experience as a journalist, writer, and editor, she covered cinema, art, and culture. She also worked in the multimedia and information services industry for Thomson Reuters. She tweets @i_swapnil_rai.