About the Author

Shalini Kakar is an art historian and a visual studies scholar whose interdisciplinary research focuses on popular art emerging at the intersection of cinema, fan culture, religion, and politics in contemporary India. She received her PhD in History of Art and Architecture from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) and a Museum Research Fellow at the Art, Design and Architecture Museum at UCSB. As a lecturer, she has taught courses on South Asian Visual Culture at The University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Her articles have appeared in the International Journal of Hindu Studies (2009) and in the book, Public Hinduisms (2012). She curated the first exhibition on Bollywood film posters in the United States titled, “Bollywood 101: The Visual Culture of Bollywood Film Posters” at the Art, Design and Architecture Museum at UCSB and also organized a conference on it.

She has served as a panel chair and presenter at the Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has also presented her work at various national and international conferences including Princeton South Asia Conference, South Asian Studies Association Conference (SASA) in Los Angeles and Florida, European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies (ECMSAS) in Manchester UK, American Popular Culture Association (PCA), among others.

For more details see: https://ucsb.academia.edu/ShaliniKakar

Film Poster: Chennai Express, 2013, ink on paper, hand-drawn