Biography

Shilpa Davé is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and American Studies and Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. 

She is the author of Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film (2013) and co-editor of the collections Global Asian American Popular Cultures, (NYU Press 2016) and East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (2005).  She earned her Bachelors degree at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.  She came to the University of Virginia from the department of American Studies at Brandeis University and she has held faculty positions at Cornell University, Wesleyan University and UW-Madison.

Professor Davé researches and teaches about representations of race and gender in media and popular culture, American cultural narratives of immigration and border crossings, comparative American studies including Asian American and South Asian American Studies, and film, television, and literary studies. She has published on topics ranging from the intersections of sound and race such as “Apu’s Brown Voice: Cultural Inflection and South Asian Accents,” to the Spelling Bee to teaching Asian American studies to comic series such as Ms. Marvel and Spider-Man India.