Education
Biography
Tupur Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Communication and Asian Studies at Tulane University. Her research spans global media studies, media industries and production cultures, feminist film and media theory, architecture and design, material and cultural histories of media and technology, South Asian cinema and media, and postcolonial theory.
Her first book, Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (New York University Press, 2025), explores Indian spectatorship as an architectural formation. It situates the post-liberalization transformation of India's screen and exhibition industries within a longer history of urban planning and architectural discourse shaped by caste-, class-, and gender-based anxieties. Drawing on industrial ethnography, in-depth interviews, participant observation, textual and discourse analysis, and archival research, the book argues that architectural mediation is central to how the contemporary media city is imagined, built, and regulated. Projecting Desire brings feminist film and media theory into conversation with media industry studies, global media studies, spectatorship studies, and architectural history. It also reconstructs a prehistory of South Asia’s current digital moment through an analysis of two decades of mall–multiplex-led media urbanism.
Her current research investigates the material and affective histories of domestic media technologies in South Asia during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the politics of representation and platform governance in the contemporary streaming era.
Her work has appeared in Television & New Media, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, Porn Studies, and Synoptique.
Before joining Tulane, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.