Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), Columbia University, and co-director of the Center for Comparative Media. Her areas of specialization are early visual culture, media materialisms, postcolonial technology studies, feminist film historiography, production & labor, environmental humanities, and critical indenture studies.
Debashree is the author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020), which approaches film history as an ecology of material practices and practitioners. Bombay Hustle won an Honorable Mention from the Modernist Studies Association (MSA), and was listed for the Richard Wall and Krasna-Krauz book prizes. Her latest publication is the co-edited anthology The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (2024) which won the first Aruna Vasudev book award from the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC).
Debashree’s current book project, Tropical Machines, develops a media history of South Asian indentured migration and plantation modernity from the 1830s onwards, and has been awarded an ACLS fellowship. The book explores nineteenth-century experiments with photography, stereography, and cinema in penal/plantation islands such as the Andamans, Mauritius, and Fiji, to argue that the media machines that are considered emblematic of Western modernity were in fact forged in the “dark” tropics. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journals Screen, and BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, and has published in journals such as Film History, Film Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, Representations, MUBI Notebook, and Modern Asian Studies. Since 2022 Debashree has been running a collaborative project on Extractive Media, that considers the entanglements of media technologies with colonial and environmental extractivism.
In a previous life Debashree worked in Mumbai’s film and TV industries as an assistant director, writer, and cameraperson, and remains committed to industry-academy-public interfaces through exhibitions, curation, interviews, film screenings, and symposia such as Camera South Asia. Some of her graduate courses include “Camera in the Tropics,” “Media Materialisms,” “Cinematic Cities | Comparative Modernities.”
Forthcoming. “Shipwreck Media: Crisis Ornaments and How to Read Them,” submitted to Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.
2024. Routledge Handbook of Asian Cinemas. Eds. Zhen Zhang, Sangjoon Lee, Debashree Mukherjee, Intan Paramaditha. New York & London: Routledge.
2023. “Media Wars: Remaking the Logics of Propaganda in India’s Wartime Cine-Ecologies," Modern Asian Studies, 57: 1585-1614.
2023. Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema, Ed. Debashree Mukherjee. New Delhi: Mapin & Alkazi Foundation.
2022. “A Night of Knowing Nothing: Cinema, Love, and Collective Struggle,” Film Quarterly, 76 (1): 11-22.
2022. “Energy and Exhaustion in a Coal Melodrama: Kaala Patthar (1979).” In S Rust, S Monani, and S Cubitt (Eds). Ecocinema Theory and Practice: Volume II. Routledge, pp. 52-69.
2022. “Archival Conjugations: A Queer Trace of Love and Loss in Bombay Cinema.” In R Mazumdar and N Majumdar (Eds.) A Companion to Indian Cinema, Wiley-Blackwell Publications, pp. 122-146.
2022. “The Aesthetic and Material Force of Landscape in Cinema: Mediating Meaning from the Scene of Production,” Representations 157: 115-141.
2022. Decolonial Feminisms, special issue for Feminist Media Histories 8 (1). Co-edited with Pavitra Sundar. Co-authored editorial introduction, “In Medias Res,” 1-15.
2021. The Keywords Issue. 10th anniversary volume with 45 field-defining keywords. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 12 (vols 1-2).
2020. “Somewhere Between Human, Nonhuman, and Woman: Shanta Apte’s Theory of Exhaustion,” Feminist Media Histories, 6 (3): 21-51.