Debashree Mukherjee

Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor of Film and Media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her first academic monograph, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020), approaches film history as an ecology of material practice and practitioners. In her new research, Debashree is developing a media history of indentured labor and plantation capitalism in the Indian Ocean, exploring photography, communications infrastructures, and film traffic. She edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and has published in journals such as Film History, Representations, and Feminist Media Histories. In a previous life, Debashree worked full-time in Mumbai’s film and television industries.

In Paris, Mukherjee plans to explore the transmedial lives of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s “Paul et Virginie” (1787), delving into its impact on colonial and postcolonial imaginations of tropical islands, while organizing interdisciplinary workshops that draw on her research in film and media, feminist decolonial historiography, and environmental humanities to uncover the novel’s enduring influence across various media and academic fields.