Priya Jaikumar, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies

213.740.3334
pjaikumar@cinema.usc.edu
LUC 405

Priya Jaikumar brings her interest in colonial and transnational cultural formations to the range of graduate seminars and undergraduate courses she teaches at the Division of Critical Studies. These include seminars on postcolonial theory and cinema; on the national / regional cinemas of Britain and India; graduate surveys on international sound film; film aesthetics; and globalization in the media.

Jaikumar's research has focused on the problem of interpreting historical change in cultural industries and aesthetic forms, in particular the break from colonial relations dominating the nexus of Britain, India and the dominions. Her book Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India challenges the rubric of national cinema dominant in film studies, to detail the intertwined film histories of a declining empire and a nascent nation. Her scholarly work on questions of state power, cultural regulation, film form and feminism has also appeared in Cinema Journal, The Moving Image, Post Script, Screen, World Literature Today, and in recent anthologies such as Hollywood Abroad and Transnational Feminist Encounters In Film and Media.  Currently, she is working on architecture, photography and cinema in the colonial context.