Professor Birgit Beumers
Research Associate
Research Interests and Publications
Her research interests are in the field of culture (especially film and theater) in the post-Soviet space, particularly Russia and Central Asia.
Publications in English include A History of Russian Cinema (2009), Performing Violence (with Mark Lipovetsky, 2009), Aleksandr Sokurov: Russian Ark (2016); as editor, Cinema in Central Asia: Rewriting Cultural Histories (with Gulnara Abikeyeva and Michael Rouland, 2013), A Companion to Russian Cinema (2016), Ruptures and Continuities in Soviet/Russian Cinema (with Eugénie Zvonkine, 2018), Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia (with Alexander Etkind, Olga Gurova, Sanna Turoma, 2018). She is the editor of the KINO book series (Bloomsbury), as well as the KinoSputniks series (Intellect), and the journals KinoKultura (online) and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema (Taylor & Francis).
DFG research grant (2024-2027)
Central Asia as cinematic territory: the power of culture
This project engages with the production of cinematic content in the Central Asian republics (CARs) since their independence. It explores film production as part of a media industry that has potential political power, and as a means of creating narratives about national history and identity. The research project examines recent geopolitical changes and questions how and to what extent CARs, as former Soviet socialist republics, have mastered the transition from a nationalised cultural sector to de-centralised market structures, and which new alliances have been shaped. Cinematic content and its production are studied within the mechanisms of the film industry, i.e., production, distribution and consumption, in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan (mapping cinematic territories), and by analysing selected – both state and independently produced – filmic examples which write or undermine traditional (hi)stories ("soft power"). By combining methods of cultural, film and media studies, the research project puts the film business in Central Asia into a global context.
Office Hours
- by agreement
Birgit Beumers studied Modern Languages at Oxford and, after completing her PhD, taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol before taking up a Chair in Film Studies at Aberystwyth (Wales), from which she became Emeritus Professor in 2018. From 2019 to 2022, she held the Chair in Slavic Literature and Culture at the University of Passau, Germany, which closed on April 1st 2022. She is currently affiliated with the Chair of Political Communication with a focus on Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet region (Prof. Töpfl) and teaches by lectureship in the field of film studies at the Chair of Modern German Literature and Media Semiotics and in the field of culture and literature of Eastern Europe at the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History of Eastern Europe and its Cultures.
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