Associate Professor Sangita Gopal, cinema studies, has been appointed by OVPRI as the next director for CSWS. Gopal has served as interim director of CSWS for the last year. Prior to that, she served as convenor for the CSWS Women of Color Project as well as associate director of the center. She will serve a three-year term, which is renewable for a second term.

With a background in comparative media studies and postcolonial theory, Gopal came to the University of Oregon in 2004 to teach cinema studies in the Department of English. Over time she saw the popular program grow from an English concentration into a unique tri-school major, then into its own department housed in the college of Arts and Sciences.

Gopal's research centers in media's social dynamics especially on questions of gender and sexuality. More specifically, her research combines the sociology of media with industrial studies in order to understand how the two interact and create certain narratives and generic structures, particularly regarding gender. Her first book, Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 2011) looked at how the thematization of marriage shifted in Indian cinema during a certain moment of social, cultural, and industrial transformation in the 1990s. Supported by two CSWS faculty research grants, Gopal is completing her second book, Mixed Media: Women's Filmmaking in India in the 1980s.

CSWS thanks chair Gyoung-Ah Lee and Angie Hopkins, Jenée Wilde, and Kemi Balogun for their work on the search committee, as well as advisory board members for interviewing candidates.