Pooja Rangan

Pooja Rangan is author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (2017) and an associate professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. She is a 2020-21 ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow at the Center for Media, Culture, and History at NYU, where she is researching and writing a book on how documentary forms design our sonic reality by modeling ways of speaking and listening (tentatively titled Audibilities: Documentary and Sonic Governance). Rangan is also at work on two collaborative projects: an anthology of essays titled Thinking with an Accent (co-edited with Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Akshya Saxena, and Pavitra Sundar), and a co-authored book with Brett Story that explores the role of documentary in the history and contemporary practice of prison abolition by tracking the parallel expansion of the documentary and the prison as indexes and repositories of social death, neglect, and organized abandonment. 

For a full list of publications please see poojarangan.com

BOOK 

Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press, June 2017) (2019 Harry Levin Prize for Outstanding First Book from ACLA; Finalist for 2018 ASAP Book Prize; PDF links to Introduction)

EDITED COLLECTION

Special Issue on Documentary Audibilities, Discourse 39.3 (Fall 2017), Co-Edited with Genevieve Yue

IN PROGRESS

Audibilities: Documentary and Sonic Governance (book manuscript in progress)

Thinking with an Accent (edited anthology in progress; Co-Editor with Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Akshya Saxena, and Pavitra Sundar; draft completed for contribution titled “Disability as Accent, Accent as Disability”)

“Inaudible Evidence: Counterforensic Listening in Contemporary Documentary Art,” in Deep Mediations, edited by Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Forthcoming 2020)

“Documentary Listening Habits: From Voice to Audibility,” The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, edited by Kyle Stevens (New York: Oxford University Press, Forthcoming 2021)

“Abolish (True) Crime” (Co-Authored with Brett Story; draft in progress)

ARTICLES IN PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS

“In Praise of the Poor Voice,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 4, In-Focus: Revoicing the Screen (2020): 167-172. 

“Bad Habits, or, Can Reflexivity Be Good Again?” Forum on Immediations, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 7, no. 2 (April 2020): 225-229. (PDF includes contributions to the forum by Rey Chow, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Lucas Hilderbrand, and Naomi Waltham-Smith).

“Audibilities: Voice and Listening in the Penumbra of Documentary – An Introduction,” Discourse 39.3 (Fall 2017, Special Issue on Documentary Audibilities edited by Pooja Rangan and Genevieve Yue): 279-291.

“In Defense of Voicelessness: The Matter of the Voice and the Films of Leslie Thornton,” Feminist Media Histories 1, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 95-126.

“For a Critique of the Documentary Logic of Sobriety,” World Picture 9, Special issue on Seriousness (July 2014)

“Humane-itarian Interventions,” differences 24.1 (2013): 104-136.

“Some Annotations on the Film Festival as an Emerging Medium in India,” South Asian Popular Culture, Special issue on Intermedia Emergence 8.2 (2010): 123-141.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDITED VOLUMES

“The Skin of the Voice: Acousmatic Illusions, Ventriloquial Listening,” in Sound Objects, edited by Rey Chow and James Steintrager (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 130-148.

“Auditing the Call Center Voice: Accented Speech and Listening in Sonali Gulati’s Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005),” in Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary, edited by Annabelle Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 29-44.

“Race, Racism, and Postcoloniality,” Co-authored with Rey Chow, in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

INTERVIEWS, CONVERSATIONS, AND OCCASIONAL ESSAYS

“Society for Sick Societies: Hold Your Breath,” Social Text Online (September 20, 2020)

Aniruddha Maitra, Pooja Rangan, and Aparna Sharma, “Documenting and Inhabiting Flux: A Conversation with Filmmaker Priya Sen,” World Records Journal (2019)

Pooja Rangan, Brett Story and Paige Sarlin, “In Practice: Humanitarian Ethics and Documentary Politics,” Camera Obscura 33, no. 2 98 (2018): 196-207. 

“The Solidarity of Impotence: Rahul Jain’s Machines” Docalogue (August 2018)

“How Do We Look? An Interview with Fatimah Tobing Rony,” Film Quarterly 67, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 62-68

“The Elephant’s Self-Portrait: Reflections on Humane-itarianism,” Shoppinghour Magazine 09: Authentic Human (2012): 58-61.

“Transitions, Transactions: Bollywood as a Signifying Practice,” in The Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers (New Delhi: Center for the Study of Developing Societies, 2007), 273-285.

BOOK REVIEWS

“Review of Words on Screen by Michel Chion,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 1 (Fall 2017): 119-121.

“Eating Well, or, the Incalculability of the Other: Review of Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial by Parama Roy,” Parallax 19, no. 1 (January 2013): 134-136.

“Review of Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray by Keya Ganguly,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 4 (November 2012): 632-633.