Rahul Kumar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Film and Media Studies program and the Department of English. He currently holds the Asher Family Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, and is a Graduate Fellow at the Pitt Humanities Center. His research has previously been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded Immersive Dissertation Research Fellowship. In Spring 2026, he will be a scholar in residence at the Historical Archives of the European Union, housed at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
Rahul’s dissertation theorizes Bombay cinema as a media formation that emerges through its dialectical engagement with multiple registers of Hindi popular print culture. By tracing the discursive, affective, and material circuits through which cinema was mediated, reimagined, and consumed in print—encompassing lowbrow pulp fiction as well as literary and quasi-literary/filmic periodicals—his research foregrounds the print-cinematic nexus as a critical locus of film historiography and the cultures of moviegoing in postcolonial India.
Education & Training
- M.A. Critical & Cultural Studies, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh
- M.Phil. Cinema Studies, School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University
- M.A. History, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
- B.A. History, SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi
Representative Publications
“Mediating the Middlebrow Cinephilia: Popular Print and the Making of the Indian New Wave.” Usha Iyer and Manishita Dass (ed.) Shift Focus: Reframing the Indian New Waves. Oxford University Press. Forthcoming.
“Universal Horror and Universal Weekly: The Visible Invisibility of the Invisible Man.” Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Lies Lanckman and Sarah Polley (ed.) Stars, Fan Magazines and Audiences: Desire by Design. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2023.
“A Brief History of Hindi Comics in India: Amar Chitra Katha, Raj Comics and the Internet.” Sahapedia, 2019.
Research Interests
Bombay Cinema; Hindi popular print culture; Classical Hollywood Cinema; spectatorship; postcolonial literary cultures; Digital Humanities and archiving; comparative media histories; intermediality; comic books.