Afroz Taj’s research and teaching center around South Asian media, with emphasis on the film industry and television. His book, The Court of Indra and the Rebirth of North Indian Drama, explores the origins of the Urdu-Hindi musical theater in mid-nineteenth century Lucknow. His current book project focuses on the dynamics of the transition from the Parsi theater to early sound films in the 1920s and 1930s. He is also interested in the aesthetics of cinema, filmmaking techniques and technologies, and the history of Bollywood. While researching the history of Indian cinema he began to collect past issues of Shama magazine; in his next project, he will trace the impact of Shama on South Asian popular culture, including its visual and verbal constructions of gender identity in twentieth-century India and Pakistan.
Dr. Taj is also a creative writer: he has written, published, and recited his ghazals, geet, dohe, and short stories in Urdu and Hindi. Over the past ten years, he have undertaken to film interviews with important literary figures of South Asia, and he has made a number of short films in conjunction with the Door Into Hindi and Darvazah language-learning websites. His interest in media has enabled him to pioneer the use of new technologies and multimedia resources in language teaching.