Lotte Hoek

I am a media anthropologist and my research is situated at the intersection of anthropology and film studies. I am the author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2014), which was awarded the 2016 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize. I am one of the editors of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). I co-edit the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. I also direct CHITrA: South Asian Art and Visual Culture, a research network within the Centre for South Asian Studies that is a hub for scholars and students in the University of Edinburgh interested in South Asian Art and Visual Culture in all its facets.

My ongoing ethnographic research explores the social, political and technological lives of the moving image in South Asia. I am particularly interested in the encounter between empirical audiences and the aesthetic and technological aspects of film in the context of political mobilisation and contestation. I explore the technological contours and political efficacy of transgressive media images in South Asia and I combine ethnographic methods with archival work to do so.

My current research engages the places of the moving image within state practices in eastern Bengal since 1947 and explores the historical transformation of state control of media through a consideration of artistic form and cultural technique in South Asia. I am writing a monograph that explores the nature of film appreciation as a social practice and asks how the art film has been a site for political contestation within Bangladesh.

See short videos from my research work here and here. I share my work as 'De Media Automatiek' here and here.