Anupama Kapse

Assistant Professor, Queens College Media Studies

Anupama Kapse comes to Queens College from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, “The Moving Image: Melodrama and Early Cinema in India, 1913-1947,” treats melodrama not only as a genre-bending form but as a method for analyzing problems of gender, race, sexuality, and visual culture in the historiography of early cinema. She looks into Mahatma Gandhi’s contradictory but highly productive relationship with film from pre- and post-independence, showing how Gandhi staged film as an institution and India as a nation by mobilizing modern imaginaries of pain, suffering, and injury. Kapse received her BA in English literature (summa cum laude) from the Jesus and Mary College of the University of Delhi; an MA and MPhil in English literature from the University of Delhi; and an MA and PhD in film studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is among the co-editors of Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), and is the author of two book reviews and a forthcoming essay on Indian cinema history in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture. She is also co-editor of a forthcoming anthology entitled Border Crossings: The Space of Film History. In addition, she brings administrative experience, having served a two-year term as Chair of the English Department, among other service commitments, at the Gargi College of the University of Delhi, where she held the rank of Senior Lecturer (equivalent to tenured Assistant Professor). At UC Berkeley, Kapse developed the film curriculum for the Department of South and South East Asian Studies. She is fluent in Hindi, Urdu (speaking), Telugu, Marathi, and English.