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Languages, Linguistics and Film

Academia

  • Ashvin Devasundaram is Principal Investigator on a major India-UK AHRC-funded research project 'Connecting Creative Industries and Cultural Heritage: India-UK Film Festival Federation, Youth Curation and Community Co-Creation' (2024-27).  
  • Ashvin Devasundaram is co-founder of the research/practice network around global urban violence. Outputs include an open access edited anthology 'Urban Violence and Marginalised Communities: Multidisciplinary Interpretations' (UCL Press, 2025).  
  • Ashvin Devasundaram's pioneering publications on new independent Indian cinema have established a bespoke research area engaging with contemporary currents in the Indian film sector beyond Bollywood.  
    Ashvin Devasundaram gained a Research England grant for ‘Building Creative Industries and Film Festival Connections between Bhutan and Britain’, screening and workshop in Thimphu, Bhutan, June 2023. 
  • Ashvin Devasundaram was lead researcher gaining British Academy seed funding in 2022 to conduct workshops around the theme: Confronting Urban Violence in Brazil and India. 
  • Ashvin Devasundaram was creative director of the UK Heritage Lottery funded research project ‘Memories Through Cinema’ a collaboration between the UK Asian Film Festival and Queen Mary University (2017-18). The project won a QMUL Community Engagement Award.
  • Ashvin Devasundaram delivered a talk at the House of Commons, Westminster, as part of the Saudha International Literature Festival 2024.  
  • Ashvin Devasundaram delivered a keynote speech at the Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt in 2023. 
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu, “Cinema of Qi: a Daoist Approach to Ecological, Sensory and Affective Cinema Through Vital Energy” in The Intellect Handbook of Documentary, edited by Kate Nash and Deane Williams, Bristol: Intellect, 2025.  
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu, “Three Modes of Independent Creative Documentary Production and the Rise of the Industrial Mode” in Chinese Independent Cinema: Past, Present and a Questionable Future, edited by Chris Berry, Luke Robinson, Lydia Wu and Sabrina Yu, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025. 
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu and Romana Turina, Essay Film and Narrative Technique, Bristol: Intellect, 2025. 
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu presented ‘Cinematic Oneness’ at Asian Cinema Studies Society (ACSS) Conference, the University of Hong Kong, May 2025.  
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu presented ‘Meditative Cinema’ at British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) annual conference, University of Warwick, March 2025. 
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu, organised Sinophone Women’s cinema and Women Filmmakers: transnational, transgenerational and transgressive practices Symposium, QMUL, June 2024 
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu, invited talk “Transmediation” workshop, at Oxford University, March 2024. 
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu, “Cinematic ideorealm and cinema following Dao: theorizing film aesthetics through Daoism” Screen, 64(4):462-484, Winter 2023 10.1093/screen/hjad039 
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu, Invited talk ‘Cinema of Qi and Qi of Cinema’ at Cambridge University “Film and Screen Research Seminar Series”, November 2023. 
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu, Keynote “Cinematic ideorealm and Cinema following Dao” at King’s College London Work-in-progress PGR conference, June 2023. 
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu and Alisa Leblow, editors for the Special Issue of Studies in Documentary Film “Feminist Approaches in Women’s First Person Documentaries from East Asia”, 14:1 2020 
  • Kiki Tianqi Yu, Keynote ‘First Person Expression on Nonwestern Screens’, European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS), Annual Conference, 2018 
  • Janet Harbord and Steven Eastwood were awarded a £650,000 Discovery Award from the Wellcome Trust in 2018 for the project Autism through Cinema, and a further £47,000 in 2022 for impact activities.  
  • Janet Harbord co-editor with Bonnie Evans (2024) of a special edition of the journal History of the Human Sciences: ‘Observation and the Mind’.  
  • Janet Harbord (2025) published the open access book Autism and the Empathy Epidemic, Bloomsbury Provocations: Medical Humanities Series.   
  • Janet Harbord and Steven Eastwood with collaborators examine autism and cinema: ‘Autism through Cinema: co-creation and the unmaking of knowledge’, (2022) International Journal of Qualitative Studies:  
  • Janet Harbord and Steven Eastwood organised an international conference Autism Plays Itself conference, at BLOC QMUL January 2023.  
  • Janet Harbord invited presenter at Centre for Culture and the Mind at the University of Copenhagen, at the postgraduate school ‘Cinema, Science, Medicine’, May 2024 and 2025.  
  • Janet Harbord invited presenter at the colloquium ‘Patients and Medical Staff: Interrogating Power Dynamics in twentieth-century Psychiatry through AV archives’, University of Lausanne, March 2025. 
  • Nikolaus Perneczky publishes “African Film Heritage: The Case for Restitution.” In Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, 395–402. Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2023. 
  • Nikolaus Perneczky publishes “Moving Image Restitution in Australia: Towards an Indigenous Critique.” In Inward Outward: On Witnessing and Care in the Archive, edited by Rachel Somers Miles, Alana Osbourne, Eleni Tzialli, and Wayne Modest, 32–36. Amsterdam: Research Center for Material Culture, 2024. 
  • Nikolaus Perneczky publishes “The Bibliographic Diaspora of African Cinema: Paulin S. Vieyra, ‘Shared’ Film Heritage, and the Politics of Archiving,” in PUBLIC, special issue edited by May Chew, Susan Lord, and Janine Marchessault (forthcoming). 
  • Nikolaus Perneczky publishes “Ancestral Images, Cultural Restrictions, and the Politics of Digital Storage: Keeping Aboriginal Film Heritage at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.” In Devices, Dispositifs, and Moving Images. Approaches to the Film and Media Archive, edited by Nynke Bruinsma, Giovanna Fossati, Erkki Huhtamo and Annie van den Oever. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (forthcoming). 
  • Nikolaus Perneczky invited presenter “Film/Restitution. Global Film Heritage between Return, Access and Reparation.” Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Udine, 29 November 2024. 
  • Nikolaus Perneczky invited presenter “Against Development: Med Hondo’s Migrant Cinema as a Practice of Antisystemic Worldmaking.” Marxism in Culture, University College London, 17 May 2024. 
  • Nikolaus Perneczky invited presenter “Restitution and the Moving Image.” Research Seminar at the Department of Film, King’s College London, 6 December 2023. 
  • Nikolaus Perneczky invited presenter “Safi Faye at Das kleine Fernsehspiel. Migratory Filmmaking with and against German Co-production.” International symposium Situated Histories: Das kleine Fernsehspiel in the World, Betonhalle silent green, Berlin, 18–19 November 2023.  
  • Nikolaus Perneczky invited presenter “Moving Image Restitution: Some Lessons from Australia.” Postcolonial Aftermaths of Audiovisual Archiving (talk and panel conversation), University of Groningen, 19 September 2023. 
  • Nikolaus Perneczky invited presenter “Caring for the Cinematic Commons: On Shared Film Heritage and Archival Cooperation.” Inward/Outward: Witnessing/Care & the Archive (international symposium hosted by the Research Center for Material Culture), Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 16 March 2023. 
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