Faculty Biography
Vitals:
Name: Binita Mehta
Title: Assistant Professor and Chair
Department: French Department
Building: Founder's Hall
Room: G-26B
Phone: 914-323-5407
Email: mehtab@mville.edu
Degrees:
B.A. in Economics & Political Science, minor in French, St. Xavier's College, Bombay, India
M.A. in French, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia
Ph.D. in French, City University of New York Graduate School, N.Y., N.Y.
Binita Mehta is currently chair of the French Department at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, USA, where she teaches courses in French language, literature, culture and film. Her book Widows, Pariahs, and ‘Bayadères’: India as Spectacle was published by Bucknell University Press in 2002. Her article, “Emigrants Twice Displaced: Race, Color, and Identity in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala” was a chapter in a book Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality, published by Temple University Press in 1996. It was reprinted in Screening Asian Americans published by Rutgers University Press in 2002. For the past four years (2004-2007), she has received grants from FACE (French American Cultural Exchange) to screen contemporary French films on the Manhattanville College campus. In October 2004, she co-organized a joint Manhattanville College-SUNY Purchase interdisciplinary conference that took place at Manhattanville College entitled “Haiti: 200 Years of Independence.” She recently read papers at two conferences. The first, “Comment peut-on être Français?: Negotiating Identities in Colline Serreau’s Chaos (2001) and Julie Bertuccelli’s Depuis qu’Otar est parti (2003),” was presented at a conference on Issues in Popular Contemporary French Cinema, jointly organized by Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Manchester in Manchester, UK in January 2006. The revised paper will appear as a chapter in a book published by Cambridge Scholars Press. She presented the second paper, “Fashioning Communities of Women in Postcolonial Britain and France: Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach" (1993) and Colline Serreau’s Chaos (2001),” in July 2006 at a conference entitled Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe hosted by the Film Studies and the Institute for Historical and Cultural Research at Oxford Brookes University and held at Lincoln College, Oxford, UK.