Sonic Infrastructures: Mediating National Cinemas in West and South Asia (University of California Press, California Studies in Music, Sound, and Media series, forthcoming 2026)

Sonic Infrastructures traces how sound shaped cinema, culture, and national imagination across Egypt, Iran, and India, as well as the cities, ports, and circuits that connected them, from the early twentieth century onward. Moving across gramophone records, radio, cinema, and broadcast, the book shows how imperial and postcolonial infrastructures—shipping routes, railways, media systems, and cultural institutions—also functioned as sonic infrastructures, enabling sound to circulate while simultaneously regulating how it was heard.

Bringing together critical infrastructure studies, feminist film historiography, and sound studies, the book treats sound as both object and method. Centering the embodied sonic labor of female performers, Sonic Infrastructures reveals how voices moved across uneven media systems and geopolitical terrains, shaping—and troubling—what national cinema came to sound like in the twentieth century.