Ritika Kaushik
Film historian and video essayist with a focus on documentary cinema and South Asian cinema.
ABOUT
Ritika Kaushik is an Assistant Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Her academic and videographic research focuses on the history, aesthetics, infrastructures, archives, and afterlives of state sponsored documentaries in India.
Her writings have appeared in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies (2017, 2020), Economic and Political Weekly (2020, 2022), Accidental Archivism (meson press), and Docalogue. Her practice-based research is rooted in her training and experiences in film making, which in addition to her own projects include her work as Assistant Director on a major Bollywood feature film. Her videographic work has been featured at the Pesaro Film Festival's Rimontaggi Competition, the journals NECSUS and Tecmerin, and is forthcoming in an online publication by the LodZ Film School.
Before joining the University of Warwick, she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Research Training Group "Configurations of Film" at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago. She has also worked as a Research Associate at the Sarai Program, Center for the Study of Developing Societies program and holds an M.Phil. in Cinema Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University.
From 2021-2024, she served as an elected member of the Governing Council of Visible Evidence, an international community of scholars and practitioners of documentary film and nonfiction media.
Her writings have appeared in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies (2017, 2020), Economic and Political Weekly (2020, 2022), Accidental Archivism (meson press), and Docalogue. Her practice-based research is rooted in her training and experiences in film making, which in addition to her own projects include her work as Assistant Director on a major Bollywood feature film. Her videographic work has been featured at the Pesaro Film Festival's Rimontaggi Competition, the journals NECSUS and Tecmerin, and is forthcoming in an online publication by the LodZ Film School.
Before joining the University of Warwick, she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Research Training Group "Configurations of Film" at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago. She has also worked as a Research Associate at the Sarai Program, Center for the Study of Developing Societies program and holds an M.Phil. in Cinema Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University.
From 2021-2024, she served as an elected member of the Governing Council of Visible Evidence, an international community of scholars and practitioners of documentary film and nonfiction media.
BOOK PROJECTS
FILES BEGET FILMS: HOW INDIAN BUREAUCRACY MADE DOCUMENTARIES
My in-progress book titled Files Beget Films tells the story of a colossal documentary filmmaking enterprise that showed India on film, through a behind-the-scenes look at the complex operations of power, patronage, experimentation, subversion, and dysfunction that governed filmmaking at Films Division of India.
Learn MorePODCAST
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Podcast About All Things Documentary
Email: ritika.kaushik204@gmail.com