Education
Ph.D., English, Purdue University, 1991
CAS Speaker Bureau Topic(s)
Film aesthetics; the Indian New Wave; Satyajit Ray
Research Interests
Aesthetics/poetics outside Asian commercial film industries
Regional and Thematic Interests
South Asia
Literature and the Arts
Profile
Dr. Ganguly (Ph.D. Purdue University) is director of the Brakhage Center and served as chair of Film Studies from 2000 to 2005. He teaches a wide range of courses which focus primarily on poetic cinema and draw on the aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical contexts of European and Asian film. Some of his courses include Time, Memory, Cinema, Cinema and Landscape, Cinema and the Poetics of Desire, Cinema and Otherness, Cinema, Exile, Nostalgia, and Contemporary Asian Cinema. He has also taught interdisciplinary courses such as Film, Photography and Modernism, classes on international directors (Bergman, Kieslowski, Bresson, Antonioni, Bertolucci, and Kurosawa) and offers a Study Abroad Global Seminar every summer in Europe. Ganguly is the author of Satyajit Ray: In Search of the Modern (2000) and The Films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan: A Cinema of Emancipation (2015). His work has appeared in Sight and Sound, Film Criticism, East-West Film Journal, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, South Asian Cinema Journal, and Asian Cinema. His speaking engagements--by invitation--include the University of California at Berkeley, Yale University, New York University, Temple University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Centre Pompidou, and the Satyajit Ray Film Institute. The Smithsonian has invited him twice to serve as moderator for retrospectives on Ray and Gopalakrishnan respectively.
Selected Publications
2017 Forthcoming - Stan Brakhage: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi.
2015 “Excavating the Text: Satyajit Ray’s Adaptation of Pratidwandi/The Adversary,” South Asian Review, 36, no. 1: 161-175.
2013 “Not God’s Own Country: The Cinema of Adoor Gopalakrishnan,” Asian Cinema, 24, no. 2: 161-174.
2012 "Satyajit Ray's Pratidwandi: The Politics of Successsion," The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 29, no. 4:320-328.
2010 "Life on the Edge: The Vestigial World of Adoor Goalakrishnan's Rat Trap," Asian Cinema, 21, no. 1: 59-72.
2009 "The Server and the Served: Food, Feeding, and Consumption in Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Kodiyettam." Asian Cinema, 20, No. 1: 60-73.