Dr. Moinak Biswas is a professor in the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He has been teaching in the department, the first of its kind in India, since its inception in 1993, and has been instrumental in setting up its programs and facilities. In 2008, he launched the Media Lab at Jadavpur, which hosts archiving work and experiments in digital filmmaking. He is the editor of the department’s publication, Journal of the Moving Image, and was one of the founding editors of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies (Sage). He has written widely on Indian cinema and culture. His research interest lies in film history, cultural theory, and Indian modernism. He wrote and co-directed the award-winning Bengali film Sthaniya Sambaad (2010).

Dr. Biswas’s Fulbright-Nehru project is to study the work of Ritwik Ghatak, the Indian filmmaker, in relation to the cultural and political ferment of 1940–70, and examine its importance at the present global conjuncture. Through close analysis of his films and writings, the project unpacks the levels of discourse and aesthetic conventions they employ, and how they connect with Indian traditions on one hand, and with international tenets of modern arts on the other. The aim is to develop a conceptual framework of “modernism,” which, working at the convergence of creative and critical energies, has left in Ghatak’s work an artistic substance of continuing global relevance.