Events

Rachel Dwyer -- Islamicate or Islamophobic?: Muslims in Hindi Cinema

"Islamicate or Islamophobic?: Muslims in Hindi Cinema," with Rachel Dwyer, Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema, SOAS, University of London.

Rachel Dwyer is Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS, University of London. She took her BA in Sanskrit at SOAS, followed by an MPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. Her PhD research at SOAS was on the Gujarati lyrics of Dayaram (1777-1852). She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in cinema and supervises PhD research on Indian cinema. 

Professor Dwyer’s main research interest is in Hindi cinema where she has researched and published on film magazines and popular fiction; consumerism and the new middle classes; love and eroticism (of the wet sari and of the kiss and saying ‘I love you’); visual culture (sets, locations and costumes); religion (Hinduism and Islam); emotions (anger and happiness); Gandhi and the biopic; cinema in East Africa. She has written a book in the British Film Institute’s ‘World Directors’ series about one of the great figures of the Hindi film industry, Yash Chopra, with whom she has worked for several years. She later wrote the BFI’s guide to ‘100 Bollywood films’. 

She is currently writing several papers on Indian cinema and completing her book ‘Bollywood’s India: Hindi cinema as a guide to modern India’. Her next project is on the cultural history of the Indian elephant.

Location: McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.