Esha Niyogi De’s current research interests lie in cross-border studies of South Asia (the northern subcontinent) in relation to gender, sexuality, and cinema. Her new monograph on women’s filmmaking and female labor in selected film industries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India--titled Women’s Transborder Cinema: Female Authors and Familial Modes across South Asia—is under contract with the University of Illinois Press, forthcoming in the series titled “Women’s Media History Now!” Another initiative for cross-border research has recently yielded the co-edited scholarly volume South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters (University of Washington Press, 2020). Co-edited with Elora Halim Chowdhury, South Asian Filmscapes brings together essays by leading film and politics scholars of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, based in South Asia and across the world. Research for these cross-border studies--conducted in archives at Islamabad, Dhaka, Kolkata, and Pune—was supported by a regional (multi-country) Fulbright research fellowship and grants from the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. Esha’s previous books include the monograph Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), which explores gender critique in the late dramatic works of the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, and another co-edited volume from Duke University Press titled Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Third Text, Feminist Media Studies, diacritics, Screen, Asian Ethnology (in a special issue titled “Rethinking Regions,” forthcoming), and other scholarly venues. She is at work on a third monograph studying popular Pakistani cinema and hereditary female entertainers tentatively titled Shamim Ara and New Feminine Bodies in Pakistani Cinema: Dancer-Saviors, Fighting Women, and a Gendered Entertainment Culture. With a PhD in English from Purdue University, Esha teaches in UCLA Writing Programs, specializing in interdisciplinary courses on rhetoric that focus on media, gender, and border politics.