Dr. Tanima Kumari is an Assistant Professor (Senior Scale) in the University Department of English, Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Darbhanga, and currently a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT ISM), Dhanbad. She received her M.A. in English from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi and obtained her graduation from Burdwan University, West Bengal, India. Her interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of Gender Studies, Film Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Memory Studies, African American Literature, Indian Writing in English, and Popular Culture.

She is the author of Female Subjectivity in African American Women’s Poetry: A Critical Reading (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2023) and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, and UGC-CARE. Her research has engaged with themes of gender, cinema, memory, trauma, nationalism, identity, and cultural politics.

She was awarded the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, Travel Grant to attend and present her research at an International Conference at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, U.K., in 2020. She has also presented her research at the World Theatre Process, sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, Baku, Azerbaijan (2018), Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, and several leading academic institutions across India. She has delivered invited lectures, keynote addresses, and plenary talks on literature, gender, cinema, and cultural studies at various national and international academic forums.

With nearly a decade of teaching experience in higher education, Dr. Kumari has been actively engaged in teaching, research, academic mentoring, editorial work, and curriculum development. A committed researcher and academic mentor, Dr. Kumari has successfully supervised two doctoral scholars and is currently supervising two ongoing Ph.D. researchers. She is pursuing a two-year research project titled Revisiting the Hindu Filmmaking of Dadasaheb Phalke: Archival and Cinematic Explorations from Myth to Modernity at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla. Her current work investigates the intersections of cinema, religion, nationalism, cultural identity, and soft power through archival research and interdisciplinary approaches to early Indian cinema.