Sumita S. Chakravarty

Sumita S. Chakravarty is a media studies scholar known for her research on media theory, migration and globalization, Indian popular cinema and national identity, digital culture, and the history and philosophy of media technologies. At The New School in New York City, Chakravarty was the founding chair of the Culture and Media department at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts from 2000 to 2008, and later the Associate Dean of Media Studies from 2011 to 2014.

Early life and education Chakravarty holds dual PhDs in Communications from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and English from Lucknow University, India. James W. Carey, the Dean of the Institute and the College of Communications at Illinois, was her thesis advisor. It draws upon discourses from film studies, cultural studies, postcolonialism, and "Third World" Cinema to explore Bombay cinema post-Independence. She is identified by Florian Stadtler, lecturer of literature and migration, as "ne of the first critics to note the intricate relationship between the novel and [Indian popular] cinema" Rather than approaching Sen's work through the framework of the auteur or personal biography, the contributions in the book highlight various aspects of his cinema practice in context, broadly exploring the relationships between radicalism, cinema, and social change.

Chakravarty was the founding chair of the Culture and Media department at The New School's Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts from 2000 to 2008, and later the Associate Dean of Media Studies from 2011 to 2014 for The New School.

In 2016, Chakravarty launched the Migration Mapping project, a website that archives and examines various media forms representing migration as human practice. The website is a continually growing archive, resource guide, and research hub on the relationship between migration and media. Migration Mapping became the foundational project of the Media+Migration Lab (M2Lab), launched later in 2018 by Chakravarty. M2Lab is an online platform that hosts experimental digital projects studying the connections between migration and media. The lab is run by student researchers and fellows who lead the lab together with Chakravarty. She established The Bishwanath and Sandhya Sinha Memorial Endowed Fellowship in her parents' memory, awarded yearly to a graduate student in media studies at The New School.

Chakravarty received the Distinguished University Teaching Award at The New School in 2018. She is currently Professor Emeritus at the School of Media Studies in The New School.

More recent writing includes the chapter "Migrationmapping" in Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (MIT Press, 2021). The chapter has been described in the LSE Review of Books as offering a "critical and literary genealogy of mapping practices," prompting ways of thinking about how maps shape understandings of migration in the current digital age.

Awards Sumita Chakravarty was awarded the Distinguished University Teaching Award at The New School in 2018. She has also been awarded Faculty Development Grants and the Provost's Office Faculty Research Fund Award from The New School.

Selected publications and writing

Books

Book chapters and journal articles