Congratulations to Dietrich School pre-doctoral fellow Silpa Mukherjee, who's been named a Humanities Without Walls 2022 Career Diversity Workshop Fellow.
Silpa holds an MPhil degree in Cinema Studies from School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has written a dissertation on “item numbers,” a term first coined sometime in the 1990s by the Bombay film industry to designate a special kind of hypersexual song and dance spectacle. Silpa also had a brief stint at teaching Film Studies to graduate students at AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Milia Islamia University, New Delhi. Working through the pandemic, her PhD project engages its audience in the singular question: Is film culture itself contraband in India? Or to what extent is it contraband? She researches the 1980s Bombay film culture, where cinema is inseparable from the port city’s mafia network and a battery of intensely urban lifestyle events like disco, horseracing, gambling, cricket, and global travel, all built on the backbone of smuggling. Cinema's legal, affective and pornographic registers never fail to stimulate Silpa. Her work has appeared in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, The Soundtrack, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, Critical Collective, and several edited volumes. Silpa Mukherjee also serves as the Assistant Editor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal).
The HWW Career Diversity Summer Workshop utilizes a cohort-based approach to assisting humanities PhD students with the development of their careers. The fellows will engage in a series of workshop sessions, talks, informational interviews, and site visits, hosted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities. Fellows will learn how to imagine possible futures and leverage their skills and humanities training towards careers in the private sector, the nonprofit world, arts administration, government, public media, and many other fields.