Dr Sanghita Sen

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.