Pooja Rangan is a documentary scholar based in Amherst College, where she is a Professor of English and Film and Media Studies. Her work examines the ethics and politics of justice-driven documentary media that aim to right historic wrongs or hold power to account. She is the author of three books: The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability (Columbia University Press, 2025) on how accented, disabled, and abolitionist practitioners retrain documentary audiences toward radical horizons of justice and accountability; Thinking with an Accent (coedited with Akshya Saxena, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar, University of California Press, 2023) on accent as a multilingual mode of expertise and knowledge-production; and Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017) on the rise of humanitarian rhetorics and sentiments in documentary media seeking to empower disenfranchised subjects. She is currently working with filmmaker Brett Story on a book that examines documentary as a constitutive site of carceral world-building, and thus a crucial site of abolitionist struggle. Rangan is the recipient of the Harry Levin and René Wellek book prizes. She co-edits the Investigating Visible Evidence book series at Columbia, and is Vice President of the Amherst College AAUP Chapter.

During her two-quarter residency, Rangan will co-teach the course Making an Exoneree with Sharon Daniel and Visiting Artist Thanh Tran. She will also work with Visualizing Abolition to produce a series of virtual conversations unpacking the complexities of the documentary camera’s relationship with the prison—from brokering carceral access to the market dominance of true crime to the challenges of pursuing abolitionist aims while working within the system—culminating in an in-person symposium on May 13-14, 2026.