Sarah Niazi is Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London.

She completed her postgraduate degrees (MA & MPhil) from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

She received her PhD from the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster in London. Her work maps the entangled history of cinema’s relationship to the Urdu public sphere in India (1930–50) and explores questions of language, literary culture, performance, and gender.

Previously, she was a Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at the University of Leiden (2024-2025).

Her work has been published in international peer reviewed journals such as Widescreen, Culture Unbound, BioScope and in books by Sage, Bloomsbury, and Routledge.

In 2024-2025, together with C. Yamini Krishna and Rutuja Deshmukh, she curated the multimedial public humanities exhibition project titled ‘Chitramahal: Princely encounters with photography and film’, exhibited in Mumbai (August 2024), Baroda (October 2024), and Pune (February 2025). The exhibition explored the intersection of visual history (of photography and film), and political history of South Asia. This exhibition challenges film historiography’s emphasis on colonial geographies such as Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras as privileged sites to narrate film history. By focusing on princely states such as Kolhapur, Indore, Jaipur, and Hyderabad, Chitramahal remaps the early film map of South Asia.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Film history
• Film and Media Theory
• Indian cinema and popular culture
• Gender, Performance and Cinema
• Documentary Cinema

Teaching

Sarah Niazi has taught modules on Indian cinema, research methodologies/ topics in Asian cinema, documentary cinema, film history, and theory.

Selected publications

• Translating Pudovkin or How an Indian Actor Prepare: An Interpretive, Performative and Literary approach in Global Circulation of Film Theory (eds) Sarah Cooper and Aboubakar Sanogo (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, Forthcoming)
• Where adab meets film: mapping discourses on akhlaq and islah in the Urdu film journals in India (1930 - 1950) in BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 14:1, 2023: 80- 98.
• Disciplining cinema through akhlāq: An Urdu text on early cinematic practice inIndia in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures (eds) Toral Jatin Gajarawala, Neelam Srivastava, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Jack Webb (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).
• Sabita’s Journey from Calcutta to Bombay: Gender and Modernity in the circuits ofcinema in India in Industrial Networks of Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, ShiftingGeographies and Multiplying Media, (eds) Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta (London:Routledge, 2021).
• White Skin/ Brown Masks: The Case of ‘White’ Actresses from Silent to Early SoundPeriod in Bombay, Culture Unbound, 10: 3, 2018: 332–352. Published by Linköping University Electronic Press.
• Recasting Bodies and the Transformation of the Self: The case of women performers in the Bombay film industry (1925-47) in Interrogating Women’s Leadership and Empowerment (New Delhi: Sage, 2015).
• Urban Imaginations and the Cinema of Jafar Panahi in WideScreen Journal, 1:2, June 2010.