Dr. Eleni Liarou, BA, MA, PhD

Lecturer in Film and Television

Contact details

Department of Media and Cultural Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX
email:e.liarou@bbk.ac.uk

Dr Eleni Liarou is a media and cultural historian with a special interest in the history of immigration into Britain in the 20th century. She completed her PhD at Birkbeck in 2008 (PhD thesis title: The Cultural Politics of identity: film, television and immigration in post-war Britain, 1951-1967).
She teaches film and television history and London history. She has been the convenor of several archive workshops on Black British history and London history in collaboration with the Raphael Samuel History Centre, the London Metropolitan Archives and Hackney Archives.

Research interests

Dr Liarou's research focuses on the ways in which the human experience of migration is historically formed and articulated culturally and socially (on film and television, in journalistic and sociological discourses, in biographies, memoirs and literature), and the ways in which it has impacted on identity formation and processes of urbanisation. Her research interests include postcolonial theory and historiography, British cinema and television, the moving image as a source for cultural history, public history and the media, London history, history of domestic service in Britain and how it intersects with histories of migration and citizenship, domesticity and gender.

Current Research

Dr Liarou is currently preparing her monograph on a history of the au pair in Britain, placing the origins of the au pair scheme in the context of 19th century and early 20th century histories of domestic service. This work also explores questions of sexualised/racialised constructions of migrant domestic labour and the ways in which histories of domestic service intersect with histories of sex-trafficking.

Publications

She has contributed several entries on immigration and asylum for the British Film Institute's Screenonline and BFI's project Inview: British history through the lens:

Eleni Liarou and Mark Duguid, 'Lexicons of postcolonialism in Gangsters (BBC, 1975-78) in The Bloody Screen: A Study of violence and masculinity in postcolonial film, New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2011

UK Film Council report on ‘The Cultural Impact of UK film, 1946-2006’, contributor-consultant

British Television's lost ''new wave' moment'': ITV drama and race'. (Journal of British Cinema and Television, forthcoming 2012)

Book Reviews
Lawrence Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951-1964: Old Labour, New Britain?, Historein, volume 4, 2003-2004.

Joint book review: 1) Kathy Burrell, Moving Lives: Narratives of Nation and Migration among Europeans in post-war Britain, and 2) Histories and Memories: Migrants and Their History in Britain., Edited by Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi, Twentieth Century British History Journal, 2007, 18: 270-273

Helen Wheatley (ed.), Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007), Screen, 50: 2 (2009).