Samhita Sunya is an associate professor of cinema at the University of Virginia. Her interests span world film history, sound studies, feminist historiography, informal practices of media distribution across Southwest Asia and the Indian Ocean, and intersections of audio-visual media and literary forms. After completing her PhD at Rice University (2014), she joined the American University of Beirut as an assistant professor of visual culture. Her location in Lebanon for two years (2014-16) complemented her earlier fieldwork at the National Film Archive of India, enabling her to further explore postwar circulation histories of Hindi film and songs across and beyond the Middle East. Supported by a spring 2018 residence at Yale University and a 2018-19 Mellon Humanities Fellowship, Sunya completed her first book, Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay (University of California Press, 2022). Sirens of Modernity historicizes the category of “world cinema” in the politics of the Cold War and the manner in which popular Hindi film and songs negotiated their own worldly circuits through reflexive arguments about gender, excess, and popular cinephilia during the 1960s. A second project, tentatively titled Agents on Location, explores South-South histories of location shooting and espionage genres, as intertwined with informal and clandestine practices of film distribution. She is additionally working on a more creative project that has grown out of her interests in media studies and transregional histories: assembling a cultural history of carrom, a popular tabletop game of South Asian origin, through a collection of oral histories, memoirs, and original short stories.  

Sunya is currently the director of graduate studies in the University of Virginia’s Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures and on the executive committee of the Screen Arts and Culture forum of the Modern Language Association. She remains active in the collaborative administration of film series and festivals, most recently as a guest programmer for the Virginia Film Festival and director of programming for the Shenandoah Film Collaborative. She recently completed a certificate in museum studies from Northwestern University, which has been inspiring for her ongoing curatorial and public humanities practice. By day, she teaches survey courses and specialized seminars in Middle East/South Asia film histories in addition to Middle East/South Asia-focused thematic courses on topics such as cinephilia, adaptation, and genre and methods courses in areas such as film programming, sound studies, and film festival studies.