Ranjani Mazumdar

Name:

Ranjani Mazumdar

Designation:

Professor

Centre:

Cinema Studies

School:

Arts & Aesthetics

Room No:

3 New Building

Email :

ranjani.mazumdar@gmail.com

Qualifications:


Ph.D., Cinema Studies. Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, 2001

M.A., Cinema Studies. Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, 1992

M.A., Mass Communications. Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia University, 1986

B.A. (Hons.), Geography. Miranda House, Delhi University, 1984

Areas of Interest/Specialization:


Film and Media Theory and Aesthetics, Cinema and the City, Histories of Modernity, Globalization and Film Culture, Film and the Historical Imagination, The Advent of Colour in Indian Cinema

Experience:


Teaching at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at JNU since 2006
Visiting Professor at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, 2005
Fellow, Shelby Cullom Davis Centre for Historical Studies, Princeton University, 2003-04
Visiting Faculty at Jamia Mass Communication Research Centre from 1992-1995, 2001-2003, 2004-2005
Visiting Faculty at Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, Delhi University 1995-1996
Research project with India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) 2002-2005
Worked as an Independent Documentary Filmmaker from 1986 - 2001
Founder member of Mediastorm, India's first women's film collective which received the Chameli Devi Jain Award for outstanding women media professionals in 1992.
Documentaries include Delhi Diary 2001, on violence memory and the city (2001), The Power of the Image: A Television Series on Bombay Cinema and Prisoner of Gender (1998) which won the Silver Panda second prize at an International Documentary Festival in China (1991)

Awards & Honours:


Marie Curie European Union International Incoming Research Fellowship (IIF), affiliated with the University of Westminster, London, 2013-2014

Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) India-France Cultural Exchange Programme, Visiting Fellowship to Paris, 2011

British Academy (BA) /Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) Visiting Scholar, affiliated with the University of Westminster, London, U.K, Summer 2007 and 2008

Visiting Professor/Scholar at the Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, Fall 2005

Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Centre for Historical Studies, Princeton University, 2003-04

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) Grant for a Study of the Bombay Film Poster, 2002-05

UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) & Action Aid Grant, 1997-98 for Another Way of 'Knowing' Documentary Production

British Council Travel Grant, 1997 to screen Another Way of 'Knowing'

Ford Foundation Grant, 1995-97 for two documentaries, The Legacy of the Angryman & Whatever Happened to the Vamp

DANIDA (Danish International Development Agency) and HIVOS (Humanistic Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries, Netherlands), 1994-95 for the production of The Hidden Story, a documentary made for the World Conference on Women, Beijing, 1995

NORAD (Norwegian Development Agency) Grant, 1993-94 The Other Half of the Story Documentary Production

Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Media Professionals among Women, Media Foundation Award given to the Mediastorm Collective, 1992.

Silver Panda (Second Prize), Awarded for Prisoner of Gender, International Television Documentary Festival, Chengdu, China, 1991

International Collaboration/Consultancy:


Indian Principal Investigator of the EQUIP-ICSSR (EU-India Social Sciences and Humanities Platform) Research Project ‘FilmInd: The Indian film industry as a driver of new socio-economic connections between India and Europe’. This is a joint collaboration between Cinema Studies (CNS), School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, India; University of Basel, Switzerland; Novia University of Applied Sciences, Finland; the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland.

Invited to join a panel of international advisors for the Color in Motion. Project of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Foundation, Los Angeles, California, November 2021- 2024.

Consultancy Project on Media Industries in Brazil, China and India, United Nations - research paper submitted to the United Nations. Information was included in the Human Development Report of 1999

Best Peer Reviewed Publications (upto 5):


A Companion to Indian Cinema co-edited with Neepa Majumdar, Wiley Blackwell, 2022

Bombay Cinema:An Archive of the City: Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, Co-publisher, Permanent Black, New Delhi, India, 2007

"Terrorism,Conspiracy and Surveillance in Bombay’s Urban Cinema" in Arjun Appadurai and Arien Mack ed. India’s World: The Politics of Creativity in a Gobalized Society, Rupa Publications, 2012 (Reprinted from Social Research)

"Film Stardom after Liveness" in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 26, No. 6, 2012, 1–12, Australia

"Aviation, Tourism and Dreaming in 1960s Bombay Cinema" Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies 2(2), summer 2011, India

"Friction, Collision and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema" in Gyan Prakash ed. Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2010, U.S.A

Recent Peer Reviewed Journals/Books (upto 3):


"Technological Obsolescence and Space in Bombay Cinema" in Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar ed. A Companion to Indian Cinema, Wiley Blackwell, 2022

"Photographic Events in Hindi Cinema" in Gayatri Sinha ed. Modern and Contemporary Indian Photography Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2022

"The Cinematic Map of the Bombay Slum" in Ravi Vasudevan ed. Media and the Constitution of the Political: South Asia and Beyond Los Angeles | London | New Delhi: Sage. Spectrum 2021