Debashree Mukherjee
Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her first book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (2020), approaches film history as an ecology of material practices and practitioners, and her next book develops a media history of indentured migration and plantation capitalism in the Indian Ocean region. Debashree has published on feminist film historiography, labor, cities, and increasingly on energy and exhaustion in various film journals and anthologies. Her Feminist Media Histories article “Somewhere Between Human, Nonhuman, and Woman: Shanta Apte’s Theory of Exhaustion,” received the 2021 Katherine Singer Kovacs award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and has just published a photo-anthology titled Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema (Mapin, 2023).
In a previous life Debashree worked in Mumbai’s film and TV industries as an assistant director, writer, and cameraperson. She remains committed to industry-academy-public interfaces through exhibitions, curation, and digital humanities open-access projects.