Dr Sanghita Sen

Assistant Professor

School: Design Arts and Creative Industries

I am a film and cultural studies scholar and a documentary filmmaker with a background in English & comparative literature, and Linguistics. I completed my second PhD in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews before joining the University of Northumbria in 2023. Before moving to the UK, I worked an Associate Professor of English and taught for over two decades at different HE institutions in India, including Presidency College/ University (Dept of English), Kalyani Government Engineering College (Dept of Humanities), Institute of English, and Acharya BN Seal College, University of North Bengal (Dept of English).

My doctoral thesis at St Andrews centred on the Bengali cinema of the 1970s made by Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, and Satyajit Ray, aiming to recover their film practice in the transnational Third Cinema historiography. This research will majorly inform the monograph I am writing on Indian Third/Oppositional Cinema Practice. The field work I undertook for my thesis between 2015 and 2019 has led the way for my forthcoming feature length documentary on Ritwik Ghatak, the Bengal Partition, and refugee crisis. I have a second specialisation in Cultural Studies, having completed my first doctoral thesis in 2013 at Jadavpur University on the mediatisation of Hindutva discourse and rise of the Hindu religious fundamentalism in India.

Since completing my PhD at St. Andrews, my research interest has widened to tricontinental political cinema and its facilitation of cultural encounters between filmmakers from the Global South. I am interested in the ways in which these encounters created the foundations of solidarity, navigated within the political backdrop of the Cold War, and enabled an understanding (or lack thereof) of political and cultural projects hitherto unfamiliar to them.

I welcome PhD proposals in any of the above areas as well as the ones on transnational political, anticolonial, and Third Cinema, Bengali and Hindi Cinema, Indian Parallel Cinema, diasporic cinema, censorship, documentary, women in cinema, creative labour, social and cultural histories of South Asia, and practice-based projects.

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Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
The Documentarian Ritwik:People's Artist, People's Cinema, Sen, S. 24 Nov 2025, Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments, Chennai, India, Westland Books
Chambal as Nomadic in Global and Local Narratives on Putli and Phoolan, Sen, S., Mukherjee, I. 1 Nov 2021, Post-humanist Nomadisms across Non-Oedipal Spatiality, Wilmington, DE, Vernon Press
Review: David Martin Jones, Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History, Sen, S. 23 Jun 2021, In: Frames Cinema Journal
Ghatak in the Shadows: Films that Struggled, Sen, S. 2020, Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Context of Unmade Films, New York, Bloomsbury
From Damsels-in Distress to Indomitable Rebels: Women on Indian Screen, Sen, S. 2019, Gendered Ways of Transnational Un-Belonging from a Comparative Literature Perspective, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Interweaving dystopian and utopian spaces, constructing social realism on screen: Bakita Byaktigato/The Rest is Personal, Sen, S. 8 Feb 2019, In: Open Library of Humanities
Review of Steven Rawle, "Transnational Cinema: An Introduction.", Sen, S. 2019, In: Frames Cinema Journal
Breaking the Boundaries of Bollywood: Women in a ‘Man’s Industry, Sen, S. 2018, Women Do Genre in Film and Television, New York, Routledge
Indian masculinity: an important intervention in gender and masculinity studies, Sen, S. 13 Dec 2018, In: Anthropological Quarterly

Professional Activity

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Invited talk: Mrinal Sen's Calcutta Trilogy: Counterarchive of Kolkata in the long 1960s 2024
Invited talk: Mrinal Sen: An overlooked pioneer of Third Cinema Practice in India 2024
Publication Peer-review: CompLit: Journal of European Literature, Arts and Society (Journal) 2023
Publication Peer-review: Taylor & Francis (Publisher) 2023
Organising a conference, workshop, ...: Radical Film Network 2022
Invited talk: Indian Oppositional and Third Cinema Practice in the 1970s 2019
Oral presentation: Making of a Revolutionary Counter-Cinema: Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta Trilogy 2019
Other: Member of the Jury 2019
Oral presentation: Representation of Female Rage, Power, and Agency in Indian maritime mythology 2019
Other: Ritwik Ghatak Retrospective 2019

PGR Supervision

Hanzala Abdul Allam Mojibi - Navigating Trauma through Absurdity: An Investigation of Indian Partition Cinema and Literature. Start Date: 01/10/2024
Hanzala Abdul Allam Mojibi - Navigating Trauma through Absurdity: An Investigation of Indian Partition Cinema and Literature. Start Date: 01/10/2024 End Date: 17/10/2025