Professor Lotte Hoek
Sabbatical Fellow, August - December, 2026
Lotte Hoek is a media ethnographer whose research sits between anthropology and film studies. She is the author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2014), co-editor with Sanjukta Sunderason of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia (Bloomsbury 2021), and part of the editorial collective of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. She is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. https://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/lotte-hoek
Project title: Film Society: Cinematic Form and Social Change in Bangladesh
Film has the power to change you. All around the world there are film enthusiasts committed to this belief in cinema’s transformative capacities. Frequently organised into film societies or cine-clubs, film society activists put into practice their convictions that film can transform their sensory capacities, expand their encounter with the world, and even reshape that world through their revolutionary cinema-driven projects. In this project, I investigate this conviction and its associated cinematic practices. Taking the form of a book manuscript, working title Film Society, in this project I analyse how film society activists in Bangladesh put into concrete practice the theoretical idea that aesthetic form acts in the world. My research is situated at the intersection of film studies and cultural anthropology and draws its intellectual energies from the interdisciplinary dialogues among media scholars of South Asia.