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. 

Her first book project, Analog Intimacies: The Enduring Ecologies of Sex Education in Postcolonial India, maps how lowbrow sex films were mobilized through state-mandated public health education networks while simultaneously circulating as illicit films with pornographic potential. The project emphasizes the centrality of low genre films in shaping sexual knowledge systems in South Asia, demonstrating how sex is learned, unlearned, taught, and imagined through 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).