Rashmi Sawhney 

Rashmi Sawhney is a Bangalore-based academic and writer whose work deals with cinema and visual culture. She is currently Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at Christ University, Bangalore. Rashmi lived in Ireland for eleven years, where she did her PhD and later took up a Lecturership at the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice (www.ctmp.ie). Prior to joining Christ University she was Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her research, teaching, and publications have dealt with gender, migration, and more recently science and speculative fictions in the context of cinema. Her interest in science fiction arises from her interest in the relationship between history, the future and the present, and she sees science and speculative fictions as being ideological terrains as well as political processes through which collective social futures can be imagined. In her recent work, she has been exploring the science fictional imagination in India (editing Studies in South Asian Film and Media, 6,2 (2015)), Turkey, Japan, Argentina, Chile, and other countries outside the global North. Rashmi also headed the India Foundation for the Arts’ Arts Practice and Curatorship programmes for two years, and has been interested in the intersections between popular cinema and the visual arts and their increasingly overlapping global trajectories.