Silpa Mukherjee holds an MPhil degree in Cinema Studies from School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has written a dissertation on “item numbers,” a term first coined sometime in the 1990s by the Bombay film industry to designate a special kind of hypersexual song and dance spectacle. Media's legal, affective, and pornographic registers never fail to stimulate Mukherjee. Her writing has appeared in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, The Soundtrack, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, South Asian Popular Culture, and several edited volumes. In 2016-17 Silpa Mukherjee had a brief stint at teaching critical media studies to graduate production students at AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Milia Islamia University, New Delhi.

Mukherjee is currently completing her PhD dissertation “Cinema as Contraband: Bombay Film Culture between 1977-1991” that examines the cine-crime nexus of 1980s Bombay, formed by money invested in cinema and its ancillary high-risk businesses like hotels, horseracing, and gambling by a Dubai based mafia network. She is a 2022-23 Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellow. Previously her work has been supported by the University of Pittsburgh’s Provost’s Humanities Fellowship, Cultural Studies Fellowship, Asian Studies Center, and English Department. In summer 2022 she was a Humanities Without Walls Fellow. Mukherjee was awarded the Elizabeth Baranger Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2021.

Silpa Mukherjee also serves as the Assistant Editor of JCMS (formerly Cinema Journal), the flagship journal of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. You can read her public facing works on Indian cinema and media history and popular culture in Critical Collective and ASAP.