Sarah Rahman Niazi is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster. She works as an Assistant Editor for Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) and is part of the Hyphen Journal editorial collective.

She has worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi. As part of the organisation, she supervised and coordinated projects under the ‘Confluence of Traditions and Composite Cultures’ programme.

Research:

Her PhD thesis, ‘Cinema and the Urdu Public Sphere (1920- 1950)’ maps the interconnections between on language, literature and film practice in India. In 2011, she finished her M.Phil from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her thesis ‘Cinema and the Reinvention of the Self: Women performers in the Bombay film industry (1925- 47)’, is an attempt to recuperate from the debris of archival absence the cultural history of women performers in modern India.

Publications:

Forthcoming book chapter “Sabita’s Journey from Calcutta to Bombay: Gender and Modernity in the circuits of cinema n India” in Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media, (ed. Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta, Routledge, 2020).

 “White Skin/ Brown Masks: The Case of ‘White’ Actresses from Silent to Early Sound Period in Bombay”, Culture Unbound, Volume 10, issue 3, 2018: 332–352. Published by Linköping University Electronic Press.

 “Teen Deviyan: The Prabhat Star Triad and the discourse of ‘Respectability’” published at Sahapaedia.org https://www.sahapedia.org/teen-deviyan-the-prabhat-star-triad-and-the-discourse-of-‘respectability’,  25 July 2016.

“Performative Negotiations and the Woman’s Question” in The Book Review, Vol. 39 No. 10 October 2015.

“Recasting Bodies and the Transformation of the Self: The case of women performers in the Bombay film industry (1925- 47)” in Interrogating Women’s Leadership and Empowerment, Sage Publication & IIC Quaterly, New Delhi, 2015.

“Women Through the Cinematic Eye” in The Book Review, Vol. 36 No. 10 October 2012.

“Urban Imaginations and the Cinema of Jafar Panahi” in Wide Screen, Vol. 1, Issue 2, June 2010 http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/59/68

Email: sarahrniazi@gmail.com and w1610109@my.westminster.ac.uk