About Us

My research interests include feminist cultural studies, gender and media globalization, South Asia, and postcolonial studies. I am interested in feminist and international cultural studies inquiry that bridges the disciplines of media studies, women’s studies, and South Asian studies. A consistent theme that runs through my research is the complexity of gender as a multidimensional social category whose meaning evolves only in relation to other social formations of class, caste, race, and ethnicity.

My work emphasizes the ways in which historical and economic processes—colonialism, nationalism, and globalization—shape the social construction of gender and modernity. In addition, my analysis of global and local media culture through the lens of postcolonial theories contributes to the growing field of postcolonial media studies, a recent intellectual direction in international communication.

My research on gender and media culture spans the spectrum of media audiences, media texts, and media producers. Although my immersion in cultural studies began with an interest in media audiences, I have expanded my work to include the study of texts and producers. How do non-Western audiences incorporate global media culture into their everyday lives? In what ways do media representations operate as part of larger symbolic cultural systems? How do media producers act as cultural brokers of global modernity and local tradition? I have employed a range of qualitative methods including participant observation, focus groups, in-depth interviews, textual analysis, and discourse analysis to address these broad questions.

Gender, race, and media; cultural studies; qualitative research methods; advertising and consumer culture research; media and society; international communication; public relations

Ph.D. (Mass Communication), University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.

M.S. Media Studies, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas.

M.C.J. (Master’s degree in Communication & Journalism). Osmania University, India.

Associate editor, Dryden Press, Fort Worth, Texas, 1993; editorial intern, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, Fort Worth, Texas, 1992; assistant editor, Orient Longman Ltd., Hyderabad, India, 1988-90; public relations assistant, Tata Group of Companies, Bombay, India, 1988; reporter and columnist, Citizen's Evening, Hyderabad, India, 1987-88; freelance feature writer, Hyderabad, India, 1985-1990.