Dr. Megha Anwer

Associate Dean for Belonging, Equity, and Inclusion and Clinical Associate Professor

Education

B.A. Delhi University, India, M.S. Delhi University, India, Ph.D. Purdue University

Recent Publications

Edited Volume

Anwer, M. & Arora, A. Eds. Bollywood’s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press (2021).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Anwer M., and Arora, A. Forthcoming, 2022. “Recast(e)ting the New Woman: Caste and Gender in Recent Indian Cinema.” Caste in/and Film. Ed. J. Misrahi-Birak. Routledge. (Forthcoming)

Anwer, Megha. 2022. “Equity-Minded International Education.” Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence and ADVANCE Purdue Center for Faculty Success Working Paper Series 5(1): 13-19. https://www.purdue.edu/butler/documents/6-WPS-Spring-2022---Equity-Minded-International-Education_Anwer.pdf

Anwer, M. and Arora, A. 2021. “#ImNotAChickFlick: Neoliberalism and Postfeminism in Veere Di Wedding/My Friend’s Wedding (2018).” Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies. 12.1, 1-23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0974927621992595.

Anwer, M. & Phillips, R. 2021. “Fostering an Anti-Racist Living-Learning Community.” Journal of Higher Education Management, Vol. 36. DOI: https://issuu.com/aaua10/docs/twin_pandemics/s/11997056

Anwer, M. and Arora A. 2021. “Love Interrupted: Caste and Couple-Formation in New Bollywood.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2020.1867476.

Anwer, A. and Marwah, M. 2019. “The Incest Wound in Hindi Cinema: Childhood Trauma and Feminist Futures in Monsoon Wedding and Highway.” Feminist Media Studies. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2019.1663230.

Anwer, M. and Varner, M. 2019, “In Defense of Violent Films: Incorporating Cinematic Violence and On-Screen Death in the Undergraduate Classroom. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. 41:3, 139-163, DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2019.1684161.

Anwer, M. 2019. “Consumer Pleasures and Hindi Cinema’s En-gendered Distribution of Moral Capital in Hum Aapke Hain Koun and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.” Bad Women of Bollywood. Eds. Saswati SenGupta et al. New York: Palgrave, pp. 297-312.

Anwer, M. 2018. “Three Photographs, Six Bodies: The Politics of Lynching in Twos”, Third Eye: Photography and Ways of Seeing. Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books, pp. 385-395.

Other Publications

Anwer, M. and Roach A. “Recommendations/Guidelines for Engaging and Challenging Students in Conversations about Equity and Inclusion” (Fall 2021). Co-authored, with Antonia Roach (Program Coordinator for DEI, Honors College). Published by the Anti-Racism Pedagogy Colloquium.

Subramaniam, M., Anwer A., Freeman Marshal, J., Zanotti, L., Low-Nam, S. 2021. “How to Talk About and Discuss Difference”, Best Practices Tool #4, Susan Bulkeley Butler Center, Spring 2021. DOI: https://www.purdue.edu/butler/documents/BPT%204B-How%20to%20Engage%20in%20Discussions%20of%20Differences%20Such%20as%20Race.pdf

Anwer, M. 2020. “Academic Labor and the Global Pandemic: Revisiting Life-Work Balance under Covid-19.” Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence and ADVANCE Working Paper Series, Special issue: “Higher Education and COVID-19,” Fall 2020. DOI: https://www.purdue.edu/butler/documents/WPS-Special-Issue-Higher-Education-and-COVID-19---2020-Volume-3-Issue-2.pdf

Anwer, M. 2019. “Work-Life Balance in the Neoliberal University.” Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence and ADVANCE Working Paper Series 2(2): 52-56, Fall 2019. DOI: https://www.purdue.edu/butler/working-paper-series/docs/WPS%20Fall%202019%20Issue_final%201.13.20.pdf

Awards and Accolades

Select Teaching Awards

Teaching Academy Fellow, Teaching Academy, Purdue University, 2022.

Exceptional Early Career Teaching Award, Purdue University, 2021.

Pillar Award for Student Leadership Development, Honors College, Purdue University, 2019.

Pillar Award for Global and Community Engagement, Honors College, Purdue University, 2018.

Outstanding Faculty Award, Honors College Mentor Program, Honors College, Purdue University, 2018.

Distinguished Faculty Award for Academics, Purdue University Residences, Purdue University, 2016.

Teaching Grants and Fellowships

CILMAR’s Grant to support participation in virtual course on “Global Inclusion”, Spring 2022

Teaching Academy + Center for Instructional Excellence's Teaching Leadership Award, with Dr. Nathan Swanson, 2022.

Teaching Academy + Center for Instructional Excellence's Teaching Leadership Award with Dr. Lindsay Weinberg, 2021.

Teaching for Tomorrow Fellowship, Purdue University, 2020-2021

National Endowment for the Humanities, Indiana INcommon Grant for “Talking Race: Peer Education and Community Development,” with Dr. Lindsay Weinberg, 2021.

“IMPACT: Redesigning Education” Fellowship for course titled “Modern Love” Purdue University Spring, 2020.

Digital Humanities Faculty Innovation Grant, Purdue University Libraries, School of Information Studies and the Integrative Data Science Education Ecosystem , 2020.

Undergraduate Research Grant, Honors College, 2018, .

SAIL Grant, Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentoring, Assessment, and Research (CILMAR), Purdue University, 2019.

Exploratory Study Abroad Intercultural Learning (SAIL) Grant, CILMAR, Purdue University 2018.

Study Abroad Intercultural Learning (SAIL) Grant ($10,000), CILMAR, Purdue University, 2018 with Dr. Natasha Duncan.

Exploratory Study Abroad Intercultural Learning (SAIL), CILMAR, Purdue University 2017.

Administrative Awards

Jerome Neuner Award, American Association of University Administrators, 2021

INSIGHTS Fellow, Purdue University, 2020

Biography

As a theorist of literature and visual culture, her publications range from investigations of nineteenth-century photography, to analyzing the social structural inequities of race, gender, class, and caste as they manifest in global cinema and postcolonial literatures. Her scholarship incorporates perspectives and theories from urban studies, critical race studies, feminist studies, postcolonial studies and violence studies in a global and transnational context. Dr. Anwer’s co-edited volume, Bollywood’s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies (2021) was published by Rutgers University Press. Her publications have appeared in multiple journals and anthologies, including Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Short Film Studies, Victorian Studies, Widescreen, Global South, A Review of International English Literature (ARIEL), Journal of Higher Education Management, Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence and ADVANCE’s Working Paper Series, Caste in/and Film, Bad Women of Bollywood and Third Eye: Photography and Ways of Seeing.

In her courses, Dr. Anwer invites students to engage with visual and literary cultural productions—literature, film, photography, digital media, popular culture—in order to explore the power dynamics that infuse cultural representations. Dr. Anwer encourages a critical self-awareness in her students, empowering them to locate themselves within the intellectual and political questions of our times by interrogating the narratives we weave about the world, exploring new ways of telling individual and collective, local and global stories. For her, the classroom is a space that can empower us to imagine, and collaboratively work towards, a more equal world. Her courses incorporate creative, project-based knowledge production and emphasize an interdisciplinary, transnational, and temporally expansive approach to learning. She offers courses in subjects that are part of our everyday lives—such as photography, cinema, animals, images of racial and gender violence, and popular culture—and challenges students to harness their prior knowledge and combine it with new and innovative knowledges and practices. Dr. Anwer’s pedagogical innovations create active learning classrooms in which students are equipped to dismantle the predominant assumptions about our world and to imagine new possibilities for configuring their engagement with it. She has received multiple teaching awards and grants, including the Exceptional Early Career Teaching Award (EECTA).

In her role as the Associate Dean of Belonging, Equity, and Inclusion, Dr. Anwer is committed to embedding DEIB into all aspects of the college's functioning, building everyone's capacity, commitment, and confidence to engage in DEIB issues, create collaborations that enhance sense of community and belonging among and between students, faculty and staff, to fostering an inclusive living-learning-working climate, in which everyone gets what they need to thrive and succeed. She works to to build inter-racial solidarities, to develop frameworks that center the voices and experiences of Black, brown, and working-class people, and strive towards inclusion for all. She works closely with the Honors College’s Student Diversity Officers (SDOs), with whom she develops and executes the colleges commitment to equity and inclusion, through peer-led conversations, trainings, workshops, films screens, panel discussions etc. Dr. Anwer works with various units, faculty, and programs across Purdue to create teaching-learning opportunities to identify the impact of racial bias in everyday academic settings, and to embed equity-minded practices throughout the Purdue landscape.

Contact Info

HCRN 1091
765-494-5986
manwer@purdue.edu