Aparna Shastri

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Global media industries, streaming platforms, spectatorship, post-colonial studies, visual culture, Indian cinema,

Aparna Shastri is a doctoral candidate in the Cultural Studies program at George Mason University. She completed her undergraduate degree in Electronic Media from Devi Ahilya University’s Educational Multimedia Research Center, in Indore, India. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Writing, Rhetoric, and Media from Clemson University.

Her research interests include visual culture, media spectatorship, platform studies, global television studies, South Asian cinema, postcolonial studies, and literature-to-film adaptation studies.

Selected Publications

“‘De-Closeting’: Studying Moments of Queer Revelations in Indian Films and Web Series”. In Gender, Sexuality, and Indian Cinema: Queer Visuals, edited by Srija Sanyal, 58-77. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023.

Review of Television and the Afghan Culture Wars Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists by Wazhmah Osman (University of Illinois Press), Lateral 11.1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.25158/L11.1.7

Review of The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication by Yohei Igarashi (Stanford University Press), Victoriographies, Volume 11 Issue 3, Page 339-341, ISSN 2044-2416 Available Online Nov 2021 https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2021.0439

Review of Literature in Our Lives: Talking About Texts from Shakespeare to Philip Pullman, Brontë Studies (2021), 46:4, 417-418, DOI: 10.1080/14748932.2021.1952786

Review of The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination., Brontë Studies (2020), 45:3, 302-303, DOI: 10.1080/14748932.2020.1756333

Courses Taught

INTS 245: Visual Culture and Society

INTS 101: Narratives of Identity

CULT 320: Globalization and Culture

INTS 491 Senior Capstone

Recent Presentations

Revelatory Spectatorship and the Contemporary Police Procedural Web Series in India. Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago. April 2025.

‘WhatsApp Spectatorship’: Studying Engagement of ‘User-Spectators’ with WhatsApp and its Political Potential in India. Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Boston. March 2024.

“SVOD Spectatorship in India and Counter-Hegemonic Potentials”, International symposium: Streaming in the Global South. Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University, Lithuania. January 2024.

"Televisual Homogeneity: A Case Study of Netflix’s Sacred Games and The Gift". Global South Graduate Student Conference, Center for Social Science Research, George Mason University. May 2022.