People - Faculty - Mahadevan
Sudhir Mahadevan
Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies program, Department of Comparative Literature
Areas of Study: Early cinema and pre-cinema, 19th century photography and visual culture,
Indian cinema, media history and theory
Sudhir Mahadevan is Assistant Professor in the Cinema Studies program of the University's Comparative Literature department. He is teaching courses this year on post-independence Hindi cinema as well as India's parallel, realist, and avant-garde film traditions. In addition, he is also teaching courses on film history and film aesthetics.
Prof. Mahadevan's doctoral thesis from NYU's Cinema Studies (where he received his M.A in Cinema Studies as well) narrated the commercial and technological origins and development of photography and early cinema in Bengal from 1840 to 1920. The thesis analyzed the impact of global-imperial trade networks in facilitating the traffic of images and technology between Bengal, the U.K and the U.S, and in establishing the viability of commercial photography, print culture, and early cinema as related enterprises of popular visual culture in Bengal.
His research interests include comparative histories of early film cultures in South Asia, and for the long-term, a history of the transformations in film form in post-independence commercial Indian cinema.
In addition to working on a manuscript that develops the dissertation, he is currently working on a paper that describes the technological and political links between early motion-picture "actualities" and the emergence of half-tone newspaper photography in early twentieth century Bengal.