Ankita Deb is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Georgia. Her research and teaching interests include South Asian cinemas, adult film history, nontheatrical cinemas, pirate media ecologies, transnational film circulation, film censorship, and feminist film historiography. 

She is currently working on her first book project, titled, Analog Intimacies: The Enduring Ecologies of Sex Education in Postcolonial India, that maps the enduring life of low brow sex films that were mobilized though state-mandated public health education networks and as illicit films with pornographic potential. The project emphasizes the centrality of low genre films in shaping sexual knowledge systems in South Asia and demonstrates how sex is learned, unlearned, taught, consumed, and imagined primarily through such illicit and delegitimized media forms.

Her work has been recognized by the Graduate Student Award by the Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2022), and has been generously supported by the Mellon Dissertation Fellowship and the Steven and Debi Wisch Fellowship at Stanford University.

Her writing has also appeared in Feminist Media Histories and South Asian Review and is forthcoming in the edited volume Shift Focus: Reframing the Indian New Waves (Oxford University Press).