Anupama Kapse
Assistant Professor
anupama.kapse@qc.cuny.edu
Anupama Kapse comes to Queens College from the University of California,
Berkeley. Her dissertation, "The Moving Image: Melodrama and Early
Cinema in India, 1913-1947," treats melodrama not only as a
genre-bending form but as a method for analyzing problems of gender,
race, sexuality, and visual culture in the historiography of early
cinema. She looks into Mahatma Gandhi’s contradictory but highly
productive relationship with film from pre- and post-independence,
showing how Gandhi staged film as an institution and India as a nation
by mobilizing modern imaginaries of pain, suffering, and injury. Kapse received her BA in English literature (summa cum laude)
from the Jesus and Mary College of the University of Delhi; an MA and
MPhil in English literature from the University of Delhi; and an MA and
PhD in film studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is
among the co-editors of Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), and is the author of two book
reviews and a forthcoming essay on Indian cinema history in The
Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture. She is also co-editor of a
forthcoming anthology entitled Border Crossings: The Space of Film
History. In addition, she brings administrative experience, having
served a two-year term as Chair of the English Department, among other
service commitments, at the Gargi College of the University of Delhi,
where she held the rank of Senior Lecturer (equivalent to tenured
Assistant Professor). At UC Berkeley, Kapse developed the film
curriculum for the Department of South and South East Asian Studies.
She is fluent in Hindi, Urdu (speaking), Telugu, Marathi, and English.
