Silpa Mukherjee holds an MPhil degree in Cinema Studies from School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has written a dissertation on “item numbers,” a term first coined sometime in the 1990s by the Bombay film industry to designate a special kind of hypersexual song and dance spectacle. Silpa also had a brief stint at teaching Film Studies to graduate students at AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Milia Islamia University, New Delhi. Working through the pandemic, her PhD project engages its audience in the singular question: Is film culture itself contraband in India? Or to what extent is it contraband? She researches the 1980s Bombay film culture, where cinema is inseparable from the port city’s mafia network and a battery of intensely urban lifestyle events like disco, horseracing, gambling, cricket, and global travel, all built on the backbone of smuggling. Cinema's legal, affective and pornographic registers never fail to stimulate Silpa. Her work has appeared in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, The Soundtrack, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, Critical Collective, and several edited volumes. Silpa Mukherjee also serves as the Assistant Editor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal).