Assistant Professor
About
Dr. Swapnil Rai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she 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 book Networked Bollywood: How Star Power Globalized Hindi Cinema, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
She has published her scholarship in a range of journals such as the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Communication, South Asian Popular Culture, Media, Culture and Society, JumpCut, Journal of the School of Literature (JSL), and Cinephile.
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 beats pertaining to cinema, art, and culture. She also worked in the multimedia and information services industry for Thomson Reuters. She tweets @i_swapnil_rai.
Affiliation(s)
UM - The Institute for Research on Women and Gender
UM - International Institute
UM - Center for World Performance Studies
UM - Center for South Asian Studies
Recent Publications
Board Memberships
Console-ing Passions: Feminist Media Collective
Television & New Media: Journal
Popular Communication: Journal
