Description:

Please join the South Asia Resesarch Forum for this talk given by Rini Mehta (University of Illinois)

Rini Bhattacharya Mehta is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an affiliate of National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Mehta works on the evolution and synthesis of modernity; nationalism, religious revival, cinema and the post-global nation state. Her book on Indian Cinema, Unruly Cinema: History, Politics, and Bollywood was published by University of Illinois Press in June 2020.

She has published two co-edited anthologies: Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora (Anthem Press, 2010) and Indian Partition in Literature and Films: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Routledge, 2014). One of the recipients of University of Illinois’s first Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities, she is currently leading a Digital Humanities Project on Global Film History. She is currently a LAS fellow in the second discipline (2021-2023), studying Computer Science.

Her website https://go.illinois.edu/rinibmehta has an almost complete list of her publications; her digital visualizations are available at https://observablehq.com/@rbhttchr, and she also has a nascent blog hosted by Medium at https://medium.com/culture-umbrella.