About the Author

Amit S. Rai is Senior Lecturer in New Media and Communication in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London and Visiting Faculty at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai. Previously he was an associate professor of film, media, and postcolonial studies at Florida State University. He received his PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1995, and has taught at the New School for Social Research and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. He is the author of Rule of Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, and Power (Palgrave: 2002). He has written on Indian masculinity in film, anthropologies of monstrosity, sympathetic discursive relations, and the swerves of media (clinamedia). His study of new media in India, entitled Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage was published by Duke University Press in May of 2009:
He was recently in India on a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship diagramming the perceptual mutations involved in gender identity and mobile phone networks in urban areas. Rai was born in Bhopal, India, and grew up in New York, Boston, Laguna Beach, Washington DC, and San Francisco. He lives in London.