Prashant Parvataneni

Prashant Parvataneni is currently pursuing his PhD in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He studies the politics of film aesthetics with a focus on cinemas of India. He is particularly interested in tracing and theorizing the diverse forms, functions, and socio-cultural significance of comedy across popular, art-house, and documentary films of India. He also investigates allied questions of intermediality, reflexivity, and subversion in cinema and his research is grounded in anti-caste frameworks of aesthetics and cultural analysis.

Before coming to Stanford, Prashant worked as an archivist for The Kabir Project to record, translate and curate a digital archive of folk songs from the oral traditions of Bhakti and Sufi poetry of South Asia. His poems have appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Nether Quarterly, and Haakara among others. His essays and critical writing have been featured in Seminar and Deep Focus Cinema along with a book chapter in the edited volume Caste, Communication, and Power (2021).