Sudhir Mahadevan is an Associate Professor in Comparative History of Ideas (with a joint appointment in Cinema and Media Studies). He is the author of A Very Old Machine: the Many Origins of the Cinema in India (SUNY Press, 2015). His most recent writing is on film production stills from the Bombay Talkies studio in 1930s India, and on Badnam Basti, a 1971 queer Hindi film rediscovered in a German archive in 2021, and the 1968-published Hindi novel from which it is adapted. His current research undertakes a large-scale project of thematic criticism and close analysis that foregrounds iconicity as a recurring formal and thematic component traversing the organic and inorganic, the living and dying, and expressed through still, animated and moving images, in Hindi commercial cinema and visual culture of the post-Independence era in India.