Samhita Sunya

Office Address: 041 New Cabell Hall
Office Hours: Spring 2026 Tuesday and Thursday 10AM-12PM
Instragram: @parda.pictures

Education

Ph.D, Rice University, 2014
Graduate Certificate in the Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality, Rice University, 2014
Certificate in Museum Studies, Northwestern University, 2023
Graduate Certificate in Puppet Arts, University of Connecticut, In Progress

Class Schedule

Spring 2026

TTh 12:30 - 1:45 p.m.: From Method to Practice: Capstone (4559) / Research (7559) Workshop in and Across Areas 
TTh 2:00 - 3:15 p.m.: Israel/Palestine on Film: Perspectives from the Middle East & South Asia (Co-Taught with Caroline Kahlenberg)

Previously Taught

"Playing Games: A Gateway to the Middle East and South Asia"
"Film Festivals and Global Media Cultures: Middle East - South Asia Spotlight"
"Creaturely Flights of Fancy: A Media History of Birds" [2-credit University Seminar]
"A Thousand and One Nights at the Cinema"
"Via Asia" Forum Intro & Capstone (Co-Taught with Natasha Heller)
"Cinephilia & Global Modernity"
"Cinematic Shakespeare: Middle East – South Asia Histories of Shakespeare on Film”

Biography

After completing my PhD at Rice University (2014), I joined the American University of Beirut as an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture. My location in Lebanon for two years (2014 - 2016) complemented my earlier fieldwork at the National Film Archive of India, enabling me to further explore postwar circulation histories of Hindi film/songs across and beyond the Middle East. Supported by a Spring 2018 residence at Yale University and a 2018-2019 Mellon Humanities Fellowship, I completed my first book titled Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay (2022). Sirens of Modernity historicizes the category of “world cinema” in the politics of the Cold War, and the manner in which popular Hindi film/songs negotiated their own cross-border circuits through reflexive arguments about gender, excess, and popular cinephilia during the 1960s. It was Honorable Mention for the Aldo and Jean Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies (2023) and Finalist for the ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award. Since then, I have been a Visiting Researcher (Fall 2025) at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, where I worked on an in-progress project tentatively titled Agents on Location. Agents explores South-South histories of location shooting and espionage genres, as intertwined with informal and clandestine practices of film distribution. I am additionally working--in extra slow motion!--on a more creative project that has grown out of my interests in media studies and transregional histories: I am assembling a cultural history of carrom, a popular tabletop game of South Asian origin, through a collection of oral histories, memoirs, and original short stories.

My interests span world film history; feminist historiography; informal practices of media distribution across South / West Asia and the Indian Ocean; intersections of audio-visual media and literary forms; and sound studies. I currently co-direct the Games Lab (with Brad Pasanek) under UVA's Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures; edit the Reviews section for the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies; and chair MESALC's Curriculum Committee. I remain active in the collaborative administration of film series and festivals--as a Guest Programmer for the Virginia Film Festival (2018-Present) and Director of Programming for the Shenandoah Film Collaborative (2021-2023). Thoroughly committed to public-facing work, both curatorial and creative, I completed a certificate in Museum Studies from Northwestern University (2023), and I directed, co-wrote, and animated Conference of the Moths (2024), an 8-minute artisanal stop-motion silhouette animation that has been an official selection of several festivals both nationally and internationally. To further develop and complement this animation practice, I am currently enrolled in a graduate certificate in Puppet Arts through the University of Connecticut. I teach survey courses and specialized seminars in Middle East - South Asia film histories, in addition to Middle East - South Asia-focused thematic courses on topics such as cinephilia, adaptation, and genre; methods courses in areas such as film programming, sound studies, and film festival studies; among so many other possibilities that lie ahead!

Select publications

2022 - Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, Oakland: University of California Press

2024 - "Chinaman's South Asian Inflections for Game Studies," South Asian Review 45.4, Provocations Section, pp. 542-546

2023 - "Re-Viewing 'Shakespeare on Film,'" SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 62.1

2023 - [Co-authored with Suja Sawafta] "Cinephilic Life-Writing in An Iraqi in Paris," Global South Cinephilias Dossier Ed. Rielle Navitski, Modernism/Modernity Print +

2023 - "A Thousand and One Nights in World Film History,” Paulo Lemos Horta Ed., Approaches to Teaching the Thousand and One Nights, Modern Language Association - Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series, 112-118.

2023 - Book Review: Love, War, and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan, Eds. Vazira Zamindar and Asad Ali, Bloomsbury Pakistan.

2021 – Book Review: Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, by Lalitha Gopalan, Film Quarterly 75.2, 112-114.

2021 - "Changing Winds: Oman TV, Indian (Ocean) Films, and Media Piracy in the 1980s," Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 14.1, pp. 46-67

2021 - "A Change of Address with Filmfare Middle East," in "Indian Cinema Today and Tomorrow: Infrastructures, Aesthetics, Audiences" special issue of IIC Quarterly, Winter 2020/Spring 2021, India International Centre, pp. 221-238

2021 - "Comedies of Terror: Strategic Offenses and Genre Tactics," Kristian Petersen Ed., Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology, Harvard University Press - Mizan Series, pp. 234-246

2021 - “Worldly Matters: Distributed Histories of Tunisian Amateur Cinema and the Screening of Nontheatrical Film,” Masha Salazkina, Enrique Fibla, Eds., A Global History of Amateur Film Cultures, Indiana University Press, pp. 261-277

2020 - [Special issue guest co-editor, with Kaveh Askari]. “Introduction: South by South / West Asia: Transregional Histories of Middle East - South Asia Cinemas,” Film History 32.3, pp. 1-9

2020 - “On Location: Tracking Secret Agents and Films, Between Bombay and Beirut,” Film History 32.3, pp. 105-140

2020 - [Co-authored with Kaveh Askari] "Editors' Note: On a Press Booklet for Black Eyes (1936)," Film History  32.3, pp. 191-196

2020 - "A 1973 Aramco World Magazine Feature on Location Shooting in Lebanon," Film History  32.3, pp. 223-231

2020 – "High-Fidelity Ecologies: India versus Noise Pollution in the Contemporary Public Sphere," Laura Brueck, Jacob Smith, Neil Verma Eds., Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship, University of Michigan Press: 2020, pp. 88-112

2019 – "Curatorial Reflections on Letters of Love: A Trio of Transregional Genre Comedies," Jump Cut 59: Fall, 2019

2019 – "From Seoul to Cinemascapes: The Private Lives of Contemporary Cine-Tourism in (and out) of India," Robert Ji-Song Ku, Sharon Lee, Monika Mehta Eds., Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea, University of Hawaii Press: 2019, pp. 195-208

2019 – "The Bubble (2006, Eylan Fox)," Howard Chiang, Anjali Arondekar, Marc Epprecht, Jennifer Evans, Ross G. Forman, Hanadi Al-Samman, Emily Skidmore, and Zeb Tortorici Eds., Global Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History, Farmington Hills: C. Scribner's Sons / Gale Cengage

2019 – "An Interview with Aden-Based Director Amr Gamal," Jadaliyaa E-zine, Arab Studies Institute

2017 – “Moving Towards prem nagar: An Intimate Genealogy of the ‘City of Love’ and the Lyrical Worlds of Hindustani Film Songs,” positions: asia critique 25:1, Duke University Press, pp. 51-99

2016 – Film Festival Review – Third Annual Cultural Resistance International Film Festival of Lebanon, Jadaliyaa E-zine, Arab Studies Institute

2013 – Book Review: The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India, by Shefali Chandra, South Asian History and Culture 4:3, 417-419

2013 – “‘It is Written’ (in Invisible Ink): Slumdog Millionaire's Sfx and the Realist Overwriting of Bollywood Spectacle,” Ajay Gehlawat Ed., The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology, Anthem Books, pp. 121-139

Select curatorial work

2022 - Present - Middle Eastern & South Asian Film Series, Virginia Film Festival

2021 - "When Put to the Test," October 2021, Virginia Film Festival

2020 - "Between Man and God: Chronicles of the Everyday," November 2020, Virginia Film Festival

2019  – "On Love: Of Cities, of Cinema," November 2019, Virginia Film Festival

2019 – "Family Trees: Roots & Routes," November 2019, Virginia Film Festival

2018  – "Sadat Hassan Manto from Story to Screen: A Special Screening & Conversation with (Screen)Writer/Poet/Dramatist Sarmad Sehbai," in collaboration with Mehr Farooqi and Bilal Hashmi, November 2018, University of Virginia

2018 – "Rites of Remembrance from the Global South: Screening Pasts, Presents, and Possibilities," November 2018, Virginia Film Festival

2018 – "Letters of Love (LOL): From the Middle East to South Asia - A Film Series of Contemporary Genre Comedies in U.S. Premieres," November 2018, Virginia Film Festival

2018 – "Letters of Love (LOL): From the Middle East to South Asia - A Film Series of Contemporary Genre Comedies in Special U.S. Preview Presentations," April 2018, Yale University

2017 – "Migrations and Mediations: The Politics of Movement" in collaboration with co-curators Nilo Couret & EJ Basa, DePaul University, Society for Cinema & Media Studies Annual Conference

2016 – "Urban Intimacies," May 2016, American University of Beirut