Ajay Gehlawat

Ajay Gehlawat

Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Theatre & Film
Ph.D., Theatre and Film, 2007, City University of New York Graduate Center
Email: gehlawat@sonoma.edu
Voicemail: (707) 664-3178
Office: Carson Hall 33

Professional and Personal Interests

As an undergraduate majoring in English, I grew interested in film. As a graduate student majoring in Cinema Studies, I became interested in theatre. As a doctoral student completing my dissertation, I became interested in Bollywood. As an instructor in New York City, I developed an interest in representations of race, class, gender and sexuality in cinema. As a faculty member in the Hutchins School, I have become interested in an even wider variety of subject matters, including tourism and travel, theories of alienation, representations of racial minorities in Hollywood musicals, theories of popular culture, and the ways in which media can be used to empower students and educators in the learning process.

Selected Course Offerings

Bollywood (LIBS 320C)
Minorities in American Cinema (LIBS 304)
Film Theory and Narrative (LIBS 320D)
Multicultural Musicals (LIBS 320C)
Alienation: Cinema and the Human Soul (LIBS 320C)

Selected Publications and Presentations

The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology (Anthem, 2013) http://www.anthempress.com/the-slumdog-phenomenon 

"Goris in the Story: On the Shifting Dynamics of Whiteness in Bollywood." Center for South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley, CSAS Public Lecture Series (2012) http://southasia.berkeley.edu/goris-story

Reframing Bollywood: Theories of Popular Hindi Cinema (Sage, 2010) http://www.sagepub.com/booksProdDesc.nav?prodId=Book235555

"The Strange Case of The Princess and the Frog: Passing and the Elision of Race," Journal of African American Studies 14:4 (2010)

"Slumdog Comprador: Coming to Terms with the Slumdog Phenomenon," CineAction 78 (2009)

"Kamasutra Bond-ing,” in The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader," 2nd rev. ed., Ed. Lindner (Manchester Univ. Press, 2009)

"The Bollywood Song and Dance, or Making a Culinary Theatre from Dung-Cakes and Dust," Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 23:4 (2006)