Intan Paramaditha is an author and a Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. She received her Ph.D from New York University in 2014. Her fiction, academic, and activist works focus on the questions of travel, (im)mobility and power, as well as anti-colonial feminist knowledge production. 

Research 

Intan's teaching and research interests are global media and cinema, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, postcolonial studies, and decolonial/ transnational/ intersectional feminisms. Her creative research outputs are the novel about travel and cosmopolitanism, The Wandering, and the feminist horror short story collection Apple and Knife. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (forthcoming 2023) with Zhang Zhen, Debashree Mukherjee, and Sangjoon Lee.

Prior to her appointment at Macquarie University, she taught at the University of Indonesia and Sarah Lawrence College. Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as Feminist Review (forthcoming 2022), Visual Anthropology, Film Quarterly, Asian Cinema, Jump Cut, Social Identities, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies as well as edited volumes such as Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures and Dictionnaire des femmes créatrices. 

She has received awards and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Mellon/ American Council of Learned Societies, NYU Jay Leyda Award for Academic Excellence, American Association of University Women, and Fulbright. She was a visiting scholar at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and is part of the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference (ASEACC). 

Literary Works 

Intan's novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK, 2020), translated from the Indonesian language by Stephen J. Epstein, was longlisted for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, English PEN Translates Award, and PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. Intan is the author of the short story collection Apple and Knife (2018) and the editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series of Tilted Axis Press in the UK. Her essay was selected for inclusion in The Best American Travel Writing 2021.

She was the winner of the Kompas Best Short Story Award in 2013, shortlistee of the Khatulistiwa Literary Award (2005; 2017), and the co-author of horror anthology Kumpulan Budak Setan (The Devil’s Slaves Club, 2010), with Eka Kurniawan and Ugoran Prasad.

Talks

Intan has given talks as an invited speaker at literary/ arts festivals and academic forums. As a writer, she has been invited to literary events and festivals including Sydney Writers’ Festival, Broadside Feminist Ideas Festival/ Melbourne, New Zealand Festival, Europalia Arts Festival in Brussels, English PEN literary salon, London Book Fair, Frankfurt Book Fair, Litprom Literaturtage, Paisley Book Festival Scotland, Jakarta International Literary Festival, Singapore Writers Festival, George Town Literary Festival, and Hong Kong International Writers Festival.

She has also been invited to present her research at Harvard University, Yale University, University of Hawaii, New York University, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Leiden University, Goethe University Frankfurt, University of Minnesota, University of Melbourne, and University of Sydney.

Cultural activism

Intan is the co-founder of Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (SPP), a feminist initiative that creates interventions in knowledge production by situating “Third World” women as knowing subjects as form of “epistemic disobedience” to the colonial, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal knowledge system. Since 2019, SPP has organized the feminist festival Etalase Pemikiran Perempuan (ETALASE).

Essays

Her writings can be found in, among others, Literary Hub, Sydney Review of Books, Electric Literature, Asian American Writers Workshop, The Jakarta Post, and Korean LiteratureNow. She wrote a foreword to Budi Darma’s short story collection People from Bloomington, translated by Tiffany Tsao and published by Penguin Classics (2022; reprinted in The Nation).

PhD Theses - Principal Supervisions

Current PhD students:

Phebyn Joseph
Alejandra Lizbeth Gutiérrez Hernández

Masters Research Theses - Principal Supervisions

Phebyn Joseph. Hindu Women Devotees and Menstrual Taboos: Gender, Agency and Religion in the Case of the Sabarimala Temple. Macquarie University. Awarded 2022.

Alejandra Lizbeth Gutiérrez Hernández. Contemporary Representation of Feminicide and Its Victims: Cultural Trauma and Melodrama in Mexican Digital Media. Macquarie University. Awarded 2022.

Intan welcomes HDR supervision in the following topics:

- Global media
- Global cinema, particularly Asian cinema
- Feminist and gender studies
- Cultural activism
- Postcolonial/ decolonial approaches to media

MMCC8011 Issues in Contemporary Global Media (Postgraduate)

MMCC3140 Screens, Images, Ideas - with a focus on "Travel and Cinema" (Undergraduate)

MMCC1000 Visual Media and Communications