Dr Vaishali Raghuvanshi is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at MMV, Banaras Hindu University with more than 6 years of teaching experience. Her research interests are South Asian Mental Borders, Popular Culture and World Politics and Peace and conflict studies. She has been a recipient of the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship by JNMF and a Doctoral fellowship by the Indian Council of Social Science Research for her doctoral thesis. She is a member of the International Studies Association since 2014. She has presented her research work at various international and national conferences held in New Orleans, Baltimore, San Francisco, Bloomington (USA) Toronto (Canada), Singapore, Dhaka (Bangladesh), and Kathmandu (Nepal). She has been a TED Talk speaker on the topic The Indo-Pak Equation: Mental Borders and the Influence of Cinema. She has also been a speaker at Sarhad Samvad on “Conceptualization of Mental Borders in South Asia”.

Her recent publications are “Cinematic Performance as Discourse on Critical Geopolitics: The Cartographic Imaginary of India-Pakistan Relations in the Narratives of Bollywood Movies”, Journal of Borderland Studies Vol. 38:4, 623-636, DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2022.2129425, Portraying the “Other” in Textbooks and Movies: The Mental Borders and Their Implications for India-Pakistan Relations in Dhananjay Tripathi and Sanjay Chaturvedi (eds).2021. South Asia: Boundaries, Borders and Beyond published by Routledge, India (ISBN: 9781032113562) and “The Dialectics of mental borders in South Asia: A literary perspective” in Dhananjay Tripathi (eds). 2020. Re-imagining Border Studies in South Asia published by Routledge, India (ISBN:9780367337186). She is a co-editor of upcoming books on “The Evolving Power Dynamics in South Asia: From Hard Power to Soft Power to Smart Power” and “South Asia in the Post-Pandemic World: Challenges and Opportunities” in collaboration with NIICE, Nepal. She is currently supervising four PhD Candidates working on the areas of India- Bangladesh Borders Relations through Political fiction, India-China Relations: A case study of Ladhak, Maritime Border dispute between India and China: A case study of Maldives, and Understanding Popular Narratives of Kashmir through Bollywood in South Asia.