Dr Clelia Clini
Research Associate in the Institute for Media and Creative Industries

Dr Clelia Clini is a Research Associate on the project “Migrant Memory and the Postcolonial Imagination (MMPI): British Asian Memory, Identity and Community after Partition”.
Dr Clelia Clini is a research associate on the project “Migrant Memory and the Postcolonial Imagination (MMPI): British Asian Memory, Identity and Community after Partition”. She has extensive experience of teaching and doing research in the field of Media, Cultural and Postcolonial Studies. Her research interests include: Indian popular cinema and the Indian diaspora; narratives of identity and belonging in South Asian diasporic literature and films; immigrants’ experiences in Italy in relation to cinema, media and music; representation of minorities and terrorism narratives in Indian popular cinema; forced displacement, creativity and wellbeing.
Academic background
Current research and collaborations
Clelia is currently working as a Research Associate on the Leverhulme Trust – funded project “Migrant Memory and the Postcolonial Imagination (MMPI): British Asian Memory, Identity and Community after Partition”, which explores how community identities, including a sense of Britishness, are produced and articulated by South Asian people in the UK through cultural and social practices and processes of remembering the 1947 Partition of British India.
She keeps doing research on Indian popular cinema and is currently working on an article investigating the representation of Indian poverty in films (for the German Association of Postcolonial Studies, GAPS). She is also involved in the curation of the next issue of the journal Genre Sexualité et Societé, entitled Espaces visuels. Production, diffusion et circulation des images du genre et de la sexualité, in collaboration with Michela Villani, Sarah Kiani, Nermina Trbonja and Emilie Ding.
She has recently published two book chapters: “Home is a place you’ve never been to. A woman’s place in the Indian diasporic novel”, in Rossella Ciocca and Neelam Srivastava, Indian Literature and the World: Multi-lingualism, Translation, and the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) and “Voyages à Bollywood: (trans)nationalisme et identité à l’ère de la globalization”, in Patricia-Laure Thivat, Voyages et exils au cinéma, transferts et/ou ‘chocs’ culturels (Presses Universitaire du Septentrion, 2017).
Her forthcoming publications include an interview with Avtar Brah entitled “Contemporary Feminist Discourses and Practices Within and Across Boundaries: an Interview with Avtar Brah” for the Feminist Review (2018) and the following book chapters:
- “Exploring the psychosocial impact of cultural interventions with displaced people”, co-authored with Helen J Chatterjee, Beverly Butler, Fatima Al-Nammari and Cornelius Katona for the collection Refuge in a Moving World, edited by Elena Fiddiam-Qasmiyeh, (UCL Press 2018)
- “Diasporic Dreams and Shattered Desires: Displacement, Identity and Tradition in Deepa Mehta’s Heaven on Earth”, in Journeys On Screen: Theory, ethics and aesthetics, edited by Louis Bayman and Natalia Pinazza (Edinburgh University Press 2018)
- “From Bollywood to ‘Hindipendent’ Films: Narrating the Indian Diaspora”, in Beyond Borders and Boundaries: Diasporic Images and Re-presentations in Literature and Cinema, edited by Nilufer E. Bharucha, Sridhar Rajeswaran and Klaus Stierstorfer (CoHaB IDC: University of Mumbai and CASII: Bhuj-Kachchh 2018)
- ""Diaspora, Media and Transnational Identities: Between Theory and Practice"" in The Past, Present and 'Post' Diaspora: New Directions in Diaspora Studies, edited by Nilufer E. Bharucha, Sridhar Rajeswaran and Klaus Stierstorfer (CoHaB IDC: University of Mumbai and CASII: Bhuj-Kachchh 2018)