Prof. Shohini Ghosh

Professor

Office Address:
Anwar Jamal Kidwai Mass Communication Research Centre,
Jamia Millia Islamia,
Jamia Nagar,

Shohini Ghosh completed her Masters from AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia and MPS from Department of Communication, Cornell University, USA. She began teaching at the MCRC from 1990. Prior to starting her career as an academic, Ghosh worked as a producer of UGC educational films at the MCRC where she produced, directed and edited educational films and documentaries for the Country-wide classroom project. She is co-founder of Mediastorm Collective, India’s first all women documentary production collective which received the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Work among Women Media Professionals in 1992. Ghosh writes extensively on cinema, contemporary media, speech and censorship, documentary and issues of gender and sexuality. She has been Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Communication, Cornell University, USA (1990-1996); Globalization-McArthur Fellow at the University of Chicago, Fellow at the Gender, Sexuality and Law Research Group of the Law Department at Keele University, UK and Visiting Professor to the Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture and Society at the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Ghosh’s longstanding area of interest is the study of media in relation to sexuality and sexuality rights. Every year from 2002, she has delivered a set of special lectures at the Sexuality and Rights Institute (SRI), India and the Sexuality, Gender and Rights Institute which is currently hosted in Istanbul, Turkey. Ghosh has consistently maintained an affiliation with the independent documentary film movement. Her first independent documentary Tales of the Night Fairies (2002) won the Best Film award at Jeevika 2003- the National Livelihood Documentary Competition and travelled to festivals in Australia, USA, UK, Canada, The Netherlands, China, Korea, Mexico, Croatia, South Africa, Thailand, Hong Kong and Brazil. The film made an important intervention in the debate on decriminalization of sex work both in India and outside and continues to be used extensively by academics, activists and sex workers groups. Ghosh is the author of Fire: A Queer Film Classic published by Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver in 2010 and reprinted by Orient Publishing, Delhi in 2011. The book is part of the pioneering Queer Classics Series edited by Thomas Waugh and Matthew Hays. Currently, she is writing about Violence and the Outsider: Bombay Cinema and the Spectre of the Muslim.