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 number,” a term first coined sometime in the 1990s by the Bombay film industry to designate a special kind of song and dance spectacle. Her dissertation titled An Ecology of Sensation: The Item Number in Bombay Cinema’ located the numbers within a constellation of events: liberalisation of the economy, media convergence, satellite television, music videos, beauty pageants, a proliferation of transgressive media objects during a decade of increased moral policing, ban on dance bars, the emergence of shopping malls and the context of social media. It explored the item number’s production economy, its relationship to discourses of stardom and finally its operations within a post-network celebrity culture. 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. Through the PhD Silpa hopes to engage with the mutative capacity of the media object, its existence within a complex regime of the senses, and the challenges it poses to theories of the cinematic apparatus. She is specifically interested in South Asia’s volatile borders and neighbourhoods, and the unique mediascapes that are forged by media objects filtered as contraband and the ways in which they alter the traditional affective sensibilities. Media's legal, affective and pornographic registers never fail to stimulate Silpa.