Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Senior Researcher
Field of Specialization:	Area Studies
Name:	Prof. Kristen Rudisill
Official Address:	Department of Popular Culture, College of Arts and Sciences, Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio
Indian Host Institution:	L.V. Prasad Film and TV Academy Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Duration of Grant & Start Date :	Duration: 7 months January 2012

Brief Bio:

Dr. Kristen Rudisill holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Asian studies from the University of Texas at Austin.  She has been teaching in the department of popular culture at Bowling Green State University for the past 4 years.  Her research focuses on Indian theater and dance and she has published several articles in journals such as South Asian popular culture, studies in musical theater, text and presentation, and the Asian theater journal (forthcoming 2012).  She is currently working on a book project about the "sabha theater genre in Chennai", India and a collection of translations of three Tamil plays by Cho Ramasamy in addition to beginning a new project. In her Fulbright-Nehru research titled "Transforming Tamil Film Dance: Performance, Creativity, Competition", Dr. Rudisill plans to explore creative transformations and performances of film song-and-dance sequences for competitions staged through both television and the elite school system. In this project she will document and analyze the processes by which Indian viewers creatively transform and perform film song-and-dance sequences for competitions staged through both television and the elite school system. She will employ observer participation and interviews to investigate links between class status and participation in amateur film-dance competitions. This project will expand discussions of taste and the middle class by building on the foundations of previous research about consumption and moving the discussion forward by focusing on the increasingly important roles of urban cosmopolitan Indian youth as creators of popular culture, not just consumers.