Associate Professor of Literature Pavitra Sundar recently received a Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies honorable mention for her 2023 monograph Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema (University of Michigan Press). A press release from the Modern Language Association (MLA) announcing the award said the prize “is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work in South Asian or South Asian diaspora literary or linguistic studies.”
The award committee’s citation called Sundar’s book “a lively, original, and cogent feminist analysis of singing, listening, and speaking in popular Bombay cinema,” noting that “each chapter offers rich and layered analyses that model the generative possibilities of feminist listening for a field that has until now primarily focused on the visual.”
Last spring, Listening with a Feminist Ear was long-listed for the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award.
Sundar also published a peer-reviewed video essay “On Listening” in [in]Transition, the official peer-reviewed videographic journal of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Focusing on the physical, tangible aspects of listening as well as its more imaginative dimensions, this piece of videographic criticism makes a case for listening as an embodied orientation that forges relationships across time and space.
