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Usha Iyer to lead Stanford’s South Asia Center
Iyer’s appointment is part of a wider transition in leadership across Stanford Global Studies (SGS).
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Malvika Choudhary - Tue, 29, Apr 2025
- 12:47 EDT
- 78
Usha Iyer / Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity
Stanford University announced professor Usha Iyer as its new faculty director of the Center for South Asia for the 2025–26 academic year.
Iyer’s appointment is part of a wider transition in leadership across Stanford Global Studies (SGS), with three centers and programs set to welcome new faculty directors.
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Iyer, an associate professor of film and media studies in Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History, brings expertise in cinema, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural flows in the Global South. Her research explores intersections of film and media with race, caste, and performance.
She is the author of Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020), which won the British Association of South Asian Studies Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research.
Her current book project, Jammin’: Black and Brown Media Intimacies between India and the Caribbean, examines cross-cultural media and performance cultures across the Indian and Caribbean diasporas.
Beyond her published scholarship in journals such as Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Histories, and BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, Iyer serves as associate editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. She is also co-editing the forthcoming volume Shift Focus: Reframing the Indian New Waves with Manishita Dass.
At Stanford, Iyer is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Her research has been supported by the Stanford Humanities Center, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation.
Iyer will take over leadership from the current director at the Center for South Asia beginning fall 2025.
She holds a doctorate in film and media studies from the University of Pittsburgh, master’s degrees in literary and cultural studies from the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, and in communication studies from the University of Pune, after completing her undergraduate studies in literature at St. Xavier’s College, Bombay.
Apart from Iyer, Jisha Menon will return for a final year as the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of SGS before assuming a new role as chair of the Department of Theater and Performance Studies.
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