I plan to spend my fellowship year developing my second major research project, whose working title is South by South / West Asia: Transregional Cartographies of Cinematic Action Genres. This project arises out of my broader interests in histories of “world cinema” along South-South axes, namely Middle East - South Asia circulation histories of popular cinemas.  South by South / West Asia examines the interface between the geopolitics of wars (the World Wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror) and the distributions and shifts in global action genres and location shooting – e.g., action adventure films, espionage films, and sci-fi action films – across the Middle East and South Asia.