Ila Tyagi
Humanities (Film and Media Studies, Literary Studies, Academic Writing)
Writing Lecturer
Email: ila.tyagi@yale-nus.edu.sg
Dr Ila Tyagi received her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Brown University in 2009. She worked as a public relations executive after college, handling accounts in the renewable energy sector. Dr Tyagi completed a Master’s degree in American Studies at Columbia University in 2013, writing a thesis on the sense of taste via scenes of women eating food in film. Her interests in sensory perception, cinema, and energy culminated in a doctoral dissertation, ‘Extending the Eye: The American Oil Industry in Moving Images’, examining technologies used within the oil industry to enhance the human sense of sight. Upon finishing her joint PhD in Film Studies and American Studies at Yale University in 2018, she arrived in Singapore for the first time, drawn to the way the country combines her favourite aspects of the two she grew up in, India and Kuwait. Her experience as a writing advisor includes serving as a Writing Fellow for three years at Brown, and as a Writing Consultant for three years at Yale.
American cinema, embodiment and sensory perception, environmental humanities, science and technology, twentieth-century English literature
“Spatial Survey: Mapping Alaskan Oilfield Infrastructures Using Drones,” in “Becoming Environmental” special issue of Synoptique, eds. Patrick Brodie, Lisa Han, and Weixian Pan, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2019): 32–44
“Inscribing Interiority and Ideology: Representing the Visually Elusive in the American Petroleum Institute’s Cold War Films,” in “Oil and Media, Oil as Media” special issue of MediaTropes, eds. Jordan Kinder and Lucie Stepanik (accepted, pending revisions)
“Ogling Offshore Oil: Vision and Knowledge in Midcentury Gulf of Mexico Documentaries,” in Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies, ed. Zackary Vernon (forthcoming 2019)
“Troubled Waters: Unveiling Industrial Negligence in Three Deepwater Horizon Films,” in Make Waves: Water in Contemporary Literature and Film, ed. Paula Farca (forthcoming 2019)
“Drawing Fire: Visualizing Extreme Haptic Sensation in Classical Hollywood Petrocinema,” in Energy Cinema, eds. Robert Lifset, Raechel Lutz, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre (accepted, pending revisions)
“Bette Davis,” in Hollywood Heroines: The Most Influential Women in Film History, ed. Laura L. S. Bauer (Santa Barbara, USA: Greenwood, 2019), 7-9
“Billy Wilder,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies, ed. Krin Gabbard (New York, USA: Oxford University Press, 2014), Web
“Evaluating Ecocinema: Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the Twenty-First Century, by Helen Hughes,” Senses of Cinema 72 (2014), Web
“Beantown Mon Amour: From Boston with Love,” in World Film Locations: Boston, ed. Marcelline Block (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2014), 48–49
“Barrandov Studios: The Continent’s Answer to Hollywood,” in World Film Locations: Prague, ed. Marcelline Block (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2013), 28–29
Literature and Humanities 2
Writing about Singaporean Food
Academic writing consultations and workshops