by Alice Evans, CSWS Research Dissemination Specialist
When I first interviewed Sangita Gopal for CSWS in the summer of 2011 (“Studying Bollywood,” pp. 4-5, 2011 CSWS Annual Review), we met in the Marché Cafe inside the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and had to pitch our voices rather loudly to understand one another amongst the cacophony of other patrons. But as a former theater person, Dr. Gopal had no trouble projecting her voice to be heard. And I had no trouble following the flow of her answers. If anything distracted me it was simply that I felt mesmerized by her marvelous mobile facial expressions, her graceful hand movements, and the cadences of her voice. She is a storyteller of scholarship. And she was talking about Bollywood movies—so much fun to be had in academia!
Sangita Gopal grew up in Kolkata, India, and moved to the United States to attend graduate school at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, where she studied literary theory and film studies. Attracted to theater, she was active as an actress and director in college, and in between finishing up coursework for her PhD and writing her dissertation, took three years off to manage an off-off Broadway troupe in New York.
She describes her research as being “located at the intersection of feminist media studies, postcolonial studies and globalization.” An associate professor in the UO Department of English with faculty appointments in the Cinema Studies Program and the Department of Comparative Literature, Dr. Gopal has been teaching at UO since 2004. Effective September 2015, she is the new associate director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society and will be serving a two-year term. Former CSWS director and now incoming interim director Carol Stabile, commenting on Dr. Gopal’s appointment, said: “Sangita’s expertise in comparative media studies, postcolonial theory, and feminist studies will continue to strengthen CSWS’s commitment to understanding gender intersectionally and internationally.”
Lamia Karim, UO associate professor of anthropology, called Dr. Gopal a “brilliant feminist scholar whose research engages with critical debates shaping feminist scholarship, especially in film studies and visual culture.” Pointing out her service as trustee of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), Dr. Karim underscored Gopal’s experience in overseeing grants given to both faculty and graduate students for research on India, experience that will serve her well in overseeing the grant selection process at CSWS, which will be one of her main duties. She has also been an active member of the CSWS Women of Color Project, whose purpose has been to support through mentorship and other means the UO faculty who are women of color as they navigate the academic hierarchy and the world of academic publishing. Noting Gopal’s deep commitment to diverse issues, Dr. Karim related this story:
Many of us remember her public challenge to a faculty member who had opposed the Diversity Plan in the full [University] Senate meeting in 2005/06. For an untenured faculty to have spoken out publicly, and to have taken on a senior faculty showed her principled character. She is a strong ally of gender and diversity issues on campus, and will help to make these issues more central to the university’s mission.
In making her application for the position of associate director, Dr. Gopal mentioned that during her first month as a UO faculty member in 2004, she attended an event that took place at the CSWS Jane Grant Conference Room, and that CSWS has since been an integral part of her scholarly and intellectual life. “Of the different positions that one might apply for at the university,” she wrote, “nothing seems more desirable to me than working for a center that fosters and supports research on issues of gender and diversity and that prioritizes intersectionality as the theoretical basis for this endeavor.”
Mentioning a critical moment in the international fight for women’s rights, and the influence on her own direction as an intellectual and critical thinker, Dr. Gopal wrote:
The same year—1974—that the Combahee River Collective issued their “Black Feminist Statement” stressing that the intersections of gender, race, class and sexuality must motivate all struggles against oppression, the Indian feminists who authored the “Towards Equality” report to assess the condition of the nation’s women since independence in 1947 were “shattered” to realize how completely blind the upper-caste, middle-class women’s movement in India had been to the plight of gendered minorities. The same decade that saw the formation of what became CSWS also witnessed the establishment of the women’s studies department at the University in Kolkata where I was introduced to gender studies. This global history of the feminist movement and of institutional research into gender activates all my research and thinking, and it is this global and intersectional perspective that I hope I can bring into CSWS as its associate director.
Dr. Gopal is the author of Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), which “explored how cinema reimagined its representations of marriage in order to register shifts in gender identity and social relations activated by the socioeconomic processes of globalization.”
Her current book project grew out of her ongoing collaboration with a scholarly collective that researches transnational women’s cinema in conferences and workshops at various global locations. Entitled Between State and Capital: Women Make Movies, this book “examines the constellation of forces that enabled the rise of woman filmmakers in India. Based on archival research and extensive interviews with these media pioneers, the project suggests that the emergence of a state-owned new media—television—on the one hand and a new emphasis on part of the feminist movement on questions of identity and representation created the horizon of possibility for women’s media work.”
Both book projects have been supported by CSWS faculty research grants. But more importantly, says Dr. Gopal, CSWS through its research interest groups, Women of Color Project, and various events has allowed her over the years to enter into and learn from conversations with a broader community of feminist scholars working in various fields both within the university and outside it. CSWS has provided networking opportunities as well as intellectual camaraderie, feedback and mentoring. “My work but also my life here would not have been possible without this support,” she says.
Dr. Gopal also coedited the books Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (with Sujata Moorti; University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and Intermedia in South Asia: The Fourth Screen (with Rajinder Dudrah, Anustup Basu and Amit Rai; Routledge, 2012).
Dr. Gopal says that she looks forward to continuing the work done in the Women of Color Project by colleagues Lynn Fujiwara, Charise Cheney, Lamia Karim, Gabriela Martínez, and others to foster research and leadership development for women of color on campus. In particular, she states that she is interested in strengthening the Global Feminist Connections (GFC) initiative in the Women of Color Project that has extended the theoretical agenda of “intersectionality” to bring the complex lived realities of global women’s lives into CSWS.
“I look forward,” she says, “to building on the very significant inroads made in this regard by the two preceding associate directors of CSWS—professors Lamia Karim and Gabriela Martínez. Their own research and creative projects in Bangladesh and Latin America respectively, as well as their efforts to build links between U.S.-based scholars and feminist scholars of the global developing South, is an inspiration to me, and I hope to continue this work.”
Dr. Gopal wants to explore a framework whereby CSWS can provide an academic community and research support for visiting scholars from the global South, including junior and more advanced scholars.
“While funding such a visiting fellowship poses a substantial fiscal challenge,” she says, “I believe we can partner with other units within the university that have such visitor programs, including the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and Global Oregon to put together a ‘package’ that may make such visits feasible.”
Dr. Gopal has explored this possiblility with CAPS administrators, discussing with them their long experience working with Fulbright and other international research programs that sponsor visiting scholars. “I feel optimistic,” she says, “that in cooperation with other centers across UO, we might be able to make such visits possible. In addition, I would like to participate in CSWS funding and development efforts that emphasize internationalizing CSWS.”
Dr. Gopal went on to talk about a transformative experience she had during her time as a new assistant professor, when she was involved in the Future of Minority Studies summer institute at Stanford University in 2006. From learning about interdisciplinary research on issues of race and ethnicity to participating in workshops that helped participants figure out how to balance research goals with service and program building commitments, to forming intentional networks, she says she found the summer institute a really productive and immersive format for acquiring professional knowledge and skills.
“I am keen to explore the possibility of such topic-focused summer institutes at CSWS,” she says. “This might be a very effective way for research-centered outreach and collaboration both within and outside the UO, allowing us to connect with scholars focused on gender studies nationally and internationally. I realize this is a substantial undertaking, but it is one that I would love to explore.”
—Alice Evans has been on the CSWS staff as research dissemination specialist since January 2009. She is the coordinator of the CSWS Northwest Women Writers Symposium.