Usha Iyer Named Faculty Director Of Stanford’s Center For South Asia

Photo: Harrison Truong/Stanford University

India-West News Desk

PALO ALTO, CA – Stanford University has announced that Usha Iyer will lead the Center for South Asia in the 2025–26 academic year. Iyer, an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History.

Iyer, who holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, specializes in film and media studies, with a focus on the intersections of cinema, performance, and gender and sexuality in the Global South. Her book Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema has received critical acclaim, winning the British Association of South Asian Studies Book Prize and being shortlisted for the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research.

Currently, Iyer is working on her second book project, Jammin’: Black and Brown Media Intimacies between India and the Caribbean, which explores cultural exchanges across film, music, and performance between India and Caribbean nations with histories of colonization and migration.

In addition to her scholarship, Iyer serves as associate editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and is affiliated with Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, among others.

As director, Iyer will guide the Center for South Asia’s research, programming, and interdisciplinary engagement with the region.