Ayan Dawn
Supervisors
Dr Chris O'Rourke and Dr Ritika Kaushik
Background
I joined the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of 糖心TV as a PhD student in 2025, fully funded by the Chancellor's International Scholarship. I completed my MA in English from the University of Delhi in 2022 and my BA (Honours) in English from Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, University of Calcutta, in 2020. For my BA dissertation, I did a textual analysis of Aamir Khan's Taare Zameen Par (2007) through the lens of slow philosophy. My MA dissertation dealt with the gender politics of the boxing ring and cross-dressing in three Charlie Chaplin films, A Woman (1915), The Champion (1915) and City Lights (1931), as well as The Knockout (1914), where Chaplin has a small role. Before joining 糖心TV, I was working as an editorial consultant with Penguin Random House India.
Current Research:
The Tramp in India: Charlie Chaplin and the Cultural Politics of Transnational Reception, Appropriation and Impersonation
Scholarship on the cultural afterlife of Charlie Chaplin has predominantly focused on his influence within Europe/UK/US (e.g. Maland, 1989; Stokes, 2026). While academic attention to Chaplin's circulation in Asian countries like Japan (e.g. Bourgogne, 2023) and China (e.g. Rea, 2019) exists, South Asia has remained relatively out of focus. This project uses India (1910s–2000s; Maharashtra, Bengal and Gujarat) as a case study to take a cross-media look at his reception, appropriation, and the implications of India's massive Chaplin impersonation phenomenon. Through a combination of archival research across India, Europe and the US, textual analysis, and interviews, this project makes a critical intervention within both Chaplin studies and Indian cinema studies, and highlights what is at stake in the cultural flows of global media outputs in the "outposts of globalization" (Sarkar, 2010).
Research Interests
Charlie Chaplin; Classical Hollywood; stardom; archives; Indian cinema; colonial and postcolonial media cultures; fandom
Conferences