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Dr Eleni Liarou

Positions held:
  • Senior Lecturer, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
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  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Dr Eleni Liarou is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television History and Programme Director of the BA Film and Media and MA Film and Screen Media, both well established and popular programmes that build on Birkbeck's radical reputation and distinctive leadership in this field. 

    In 2013, Eleni received a Birkbeck Teaching and Scholarship Award for outstanding contribution to teaching and learning. Prior to this, she taught film at London South Bank University and London history at University College London (UCL). 

    Eleni is a media and cultural historian with an interest in 20th century history of immigration in the UK. Her research focuses on the ways in which the human experience of migration is historically articulated in British film and television; legacies of imperialism and their role in shaping UK film and media; the refugee experience  in postwar British cinema and television. In addition to these topics, Eleni would be happy to supervise research on related topics such as:  public history and the media; London history and London on film/TV, postcolonial and feminist theories of film and television; diasporic film and TV.

    Eleni is member of the Self Assessment Team for Birkbeck's Race Equality Charter and for Athena SWAN.

    Eleni is currently working on her monograph on refugee experiences in post-WWII British cinema and television, to be published by Bloomsbury/BFI. 

    Highlights

    • Eleni has recently received two year funding from the British Academy to conduct research for the project Decolonising the BBC Archive: Radio News and the language of race in post-WWII Britain.
      The project explores the language of race using the recently digitised collection of 165,000 radio news scripts, produced for the BBC Home Service and its successor, Radio Four. The project has two key aims: first, to explore the evolution of language used to report on Black and Asian migration and experience in the UK from 1945 to the mid-1990s; second, to invite different generations of the public from Black and Asian backgrounds to speak back to the BBC’s reporting.
      This archival and public engagement project aims to reveal the ways in which the broadcaster constructed notions of national belonging in the 20th century and invite the public to reconfigure and reimagine the BBC’s constructions for 21st century audiences. In further facilitating knowledge exchange, the project will create a digital resource to present its findings in written and audio form. 

      The project will run from end of August 2022-end of August 2024.

      You can hear more about the project in this podcast 'Whose voice, whose story?'

    Qualifications

    • BA, University of Athens, Greece
    • MA, Birkbeck College
    • PhD, Brkbeck

    Administrative responsibilities

    • Eleni is the Programme Director of the BA in Film and Media

    Professional memberships

    • Corresponding editor for the journal of Critical Studies in Television: International Journal of Television Studies, a leading journal in drawig together divergent disciplines and different ways of thinking, to promote and advance television as a distinct academic discipline.

    • Member of the Editorial Board of Significação: Revista de cultura audiovisual, a publication of the Postgraduate Programme in Audiovisual Media at the School of Communications and Arts, University of São Paulo.

      Founded in 1974, Significação celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023, consolidating its position as one of the longest-running and most prestigious journals in the fields of communication and the arts in Brazil. 

    • Team member of the Raphael Samuel History Centre, a research and educational centre devoted to encouraging the widest possible participation in historical research and debate.

    • Member of the Women’s Film and Television History Network, a group of researchers, teachers, archivists, collections managers, students, professionals, and enthusiasts engaged in exploring the contributions women have made to the emergence and development of film and television.

    • Member of the UKRI Talent Peer Review College. 

      The panel college is made up of members who have significant experience or understanding in assessing the quality of major research and innovation projects across a range of areas, beyond their own specialist area. They may also have experience of assessing interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research.

    Honours and awards

  • Research

    Research

    Research overview

    Eleni has been one of the founders of Birkbeck's TV Studies Working Group, along with Dr. Janet McCabe and Dr. Emma Sandon, and BFI TV curators Ms Lisa Kerrigan and Ms Ellie Groom.

    The TV Studies Working Group promotes research into television studies, with a particular emphasis on developing alliances and collaborative research partnerships with archives and other TV and media research networks. It provides a unique multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary space, where researchers (academics, graduate students, practitioners, archivists and librarians) can share ideas about the latest trends in television studies and exchange information and progress on the development of specific research projects, the purpose of which is to consolidate collaborative partnerships and plan future work, including funding bids.  

    Research Centres and Institutes

    • Co-founder with BFI's TV curators of TV Studies Working Group, British Film Institute
    • Partner for the British Academy funded project 'Decolonising the BBC Archive', BBC Archive

    Research projects

    The digital archive: role, uses, impact

    Abstract

    Series Convenor: Dr. Eleni Liarou, Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London

    March-May 2022

    This is a series of workshops about the role of archives for public engagement and academic research. In the context of the pandemic and with more of us working from home there has been renewed pressure to facilitate digital/online access to archives, and renewed interest on the part of researchers and users to employ new digital research tools and methodologies. The series explores the role, uses and impact of public archives from the perspective of archivists and curators, academics and research students.

    The workshops are hosted and generously supported by BIRMAC and VASARI Research Centre for Art and Technology.

     

    podcast of workshop 1

    FULL REFERENCE: 

    The digital archive: definitions, challenges and implications with presentations by:

    Mark Duguid (British Film Institute, Senior Curator),  Jake Berger (BBC Executive Product Manager, BBC Archive), and  Hannah Ishmael (Black Cultural Archives, Collections and Research Manager), March 2022, BIRMAC, Birkbeck, University of London.

    podcast of workshop 2

    FULL REFERENCE: 

    Digital archives: tools, ethics and issues of materiality with presentations by:

      Dr Emily Bell, Dr. Joseph John Viscomi and Dr. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, May 2022, BIRMAC/VASARI, Birkbeck, University of London

    Summary of presentations: 

    Dr. Emily Bell

    Emily will introduce The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata, a resource that brings together database histories, language variants, newspaper terminology, and Xpaths for specific fields, in a format that creates a controlled vocabulary designed to be used across disciplines and inside and outside the academy. This case study demonstrates how researchers can use different collections and their metadata to ask research questions across national and linguistic borders, discussing the tool ShiCo and how it enables us to map conceptual shift over time.

    Dr. Joseph John Viscomi

    Joseph will explore the relationship between archives and historical materiality through his research on the depopulation of towns and villages in Southern Italy since the late 18th century. The study of migration has long opted for an approach that follows migrants, and their archives, out of and away from their points of departure. Few studies have located their subjects in the material landscapes from which migrants departed. Joseph will discuss how a critical examination of these histories requires a fresh perspective on the connections between archives, materiality, and land. He will also speak about a visualisation project, in collaboration with the radical cartographer Philippe Rekacewicz, that aims to digitally ‘map’ material and oral archives.

     Dr. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup

    In recent years big data technologies bring with them new and crucial uncertainties in the form of new biases, systemic errors and, as a result, new ethical challenges which require urgent attention and analysis. Nanna will address these uncertainties through cultural theories of the archive, arguing that big data presents our contemporary era with a number of pressing archival uncertainties. By focusing on the notions of the unknown, error, and vulnerability, respectively, the talk tunes in on three types of uncertainty that overlap and intertwine, yet also reveal different configurations of archival uncertainty, which Nanna will argue is central to the understanding of conditions of the digitally networked data archives that have become a crucial component of the cultures of surveillance and governmentality today.

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions within Birkbeck:
    3

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • British Cinema and Television 1960-85 (AHVM008S7)
    • Dissertation MA Film and Screen Media (AHVM020D7)
    • Screen Media: History, Technology and Culture (AHVM031S7)
    • Issues in Global Television: Analogue, Digital, National, Transnational (ARMC194S7)
    • Working with the Film Camera (ARMC240S4)
    • Television: from small screen to smart screen (ARMC269S5)
  • Publications

    Publications

    Article

    Book Section

    Other

  • Business and community

    Business and community

    Services

    • Consultancies and expert advice

      I was member of the Advisory group on Visualise: Race & Inclusion in Arts Education , run by the Runnymede Trust and the Freelands Foundation. 

      This is a landmark research co-commission which aims to support schools in the UK to make the teaching and learning of the visual arts more inclusive. The project sets out to better understand barriers and possible solutions, to best provide practical support from resources to aiding teacher confidence.  
       The purpose of members' input is to support the piloting of the research, connect with practitioners in our local areas, share our learning and help to shape recommendations. 
    • Consultancies and expert advice

      External Examiner, Nottingham Trent University for subject area of Film and Television within the BA Joint Honours in Humanities. 

       
    • Consultancies and expert advice

      External Examiner, Edge Hill University for subject area BA Television and BA Film, Media and Broadcast Production