Meena Pillai

Meena Pillai

Visiting Fulbright Scholar

Dr. Meena T Pillai is Professor, Institute of English, and Director, Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Kerala. She was a Fulbright Doctoral Fellow to the Ohio State University, Columbus, a Shastri Fellow to the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University, and a Commonwealth Fellow at the Media Studies Centre, University of Sussex. Her publications include Women in Malayalam Cinema: Naturalising Gender Hierarchies (Ed. 2010) by Orient Blackswan, and many other essays, such as a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas (Routledge, London, 2013) and Beyond Bollywood: The Cinemas of South India (Harper Collins, 2017). She has published widely on gender and cinema, and her essays have been part of books and anthologies by many international publishers including Sage, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Harper Collins, Cambridge University Press, the Economic and Political Weekly.

Dr. Pillai believes in extending the feminist project beyond the ivory tower, and contributes columns to English and regional language newspapers, and participates in discussions on television and radio.

Dr. Pillai’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks to study a contemporary phase in Women’s Studies by critically looking at digitally networked transnational feminist movements and comparatively locating them against similar endeavors from the Global South, moving on to the case study of a specific postcolonial locale, Kerala, India. She is teaching a course in UCLA at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/ Dance on 'Film and Transnational Feminisms: New Geographies of Women’s Digital Dissent'.