I am a media and cultural studies scholar working at the intersections of global media industries, feminist film and media theory, architecture and design, material histories of technology, South Asian cinema, and postcolonial theory.

I’m interested in how space, power, and representation shape everyday encounters with media.

My first book, Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (NYU Press, 2025), explores how Indian spectatorship has long been shaped by architecture, not just in the design of movie theaters, but in broader logics of urban planning and regulation. Through ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, archival research, and discourse analysis, the book argues that the rise of multiplexes and mall culture in post-liberalization India reflects a longer history of spatial anxieties around caste, class, and gender. Projecting Desire brings together feminist media theory, global media studies, spectatorship studies, and architectural history to trace how the media city is imagined, built, and policed.

My current project turns inward—to the domestic spaces of the 1970s and 1980s—and looks at the material and affective histories of home media technologies in South Asia. I’m also thinking critically about the politics of streaming platforms today, especially around representation and censorship.

My writing has appeared in journals such as Television & New Media, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, Porn Studies, and Synoptique.

I’m currently an Assistant Professor of Communication and Asian Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Before joining Tulane, I was an Assistant Professor at the School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

I serve as Book Review Editor at the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.