Purnima Mankekar is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles and a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore in 2013. She has been Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA and the recipient of a distinguished Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Senior Fulbright Award. Her first book, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (1999, Durham, N.C.: Duke), was an innovative feminist ethnography which connected images of woman and the nation in Indian television. It received the Kovacs award in cinema studies. She has more recently been examining mass-mediated racial violence against South Asian Americans since September 11 and transnational dimensions of media and sexuality in Asia. Her most recent book, Media, Erotics and Transnational Asia co-edited with Louisa Schein (2013, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press) examines how mediated eroticism and sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers.

RSVP: Postgraduate students and early career researchers at the ANU are invited to send their name and a brief paragraph outlining their current research project to nicholas.mortimer@anu.edu.au by July 10, 2013.

Selected participants will be sent copies of suggested reading which will form the basis of discussion.

This event is supported by the ANU Gender Institute.