Samhita Sunya is an assistant professor of cinema in the University of Virginia’s department of Middle Eastern and South Asian languages and cultures. Her research, teaching, and curatorial interests span world film history, global genres, feminist historiography, and informal practices of distribution across South/West Asia and the Indian Ocean. Supported by a 2018 residence at Yale University and a 2018–2019 Mellon Humanities Fellowship, Sunya’s first monograph was released in 2022. Titled Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, the book historicizes the emergence of “world cinema” in the politics of the Cold War and the manner in which popular Hindi film/songs negotiated their own worldly circuits through melodramatic arguments about gender and popular cinephilia over the 1960s.