Jigna Desai

Jigna Desai (born in Gujarat, India) is an author and a scholar of gender, women and sexuality studies, currently at the University of Minnesota. Her areas of academic focus include Indian cinema (Bollywood), feminism, cultural politics, South Asian diaspora studies, postcolonialism, and queer studies. Her book Beyond Bollywood was the first scholarly work to take a "comprehensive look at the emergence, development, and significance of contemporary South Asian diasporic cinema." Desai has a B.A. in Astrophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in English (with a minor in feminist studies) from the University of Minnesota. She is also a poet and a dancer.

• Desai, Jigna and Khyati Y. Joshi, editors. Asian Americans in Dixie: race and migration in the South. University of Illinois Press, 2013. ISBN 9780252037832
• Desai, Jigna. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. Routledge, 2003. ISBN 041596685X
• Dudrah, Rajinder and Jigna Desai. The Bollywood Reader. Open University Press, 2008. ISBN 0335222129
• Desai, Jigna. "Homo on the Range: Mobile and Global Sexualities". Social Text 73 (volume 20, number 4), Winter 2002, pages 65–89.
• Desai, Jigna. Rooted Homelands, Routed Hostlands : (En)Gendered Mobility in the South Asian Diaspora. Thesis (Ph.D), University of Minnesota, 1999.