Nilanjana Bhattacharjya

Nilanjana Bhattacharjya's research focuses on popular music, film, and visual culture from South Asia and its diasporic communities.  Her publications appear in journals including Asian Music, Framework, South Asian History and Culture, Jump Cut, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, and [in]Transition as well as in the edited collections Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance; South Asian Transnationalisms: Cultural Exchange in the Twentieth Century; Writing About Screen Media; Scattered Musics; and Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies, and Multiplying Media. She co-edited the first issue of the journal South Asian Popular Culture devoted entirely to music. 

Formally trained in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and popular music studies, Nilanjana Bhattacharjya now also regularly works on film and media studies and visual culture. She is presently focusing on music's relationship to narrative in films, and in using the medium of the scholarly video essay to explore relationships between sound and image. She has published previously on the dancer Uday Shankar's reception in India and abroad as well on the circulation of Hindi film music, particularly in diasporic contexts. More recently she has published pieces on the circulation of Netflix India's Love Stories, the queer relationships between the fan and star in the film Fan, writing about sound and narrative in Omkara, music and art in London's Bangladeshi communities, historical narratives in the film Gangubai Kathiawadi, and the circulation of South Asian dance music in the diaspora. She has recently also published videographic essays on gendered labor in eldercare in an Indian horror film, and motherhood and violence in a streaming miniseries.