Rajinder Dudrah

Biography

I joined BCU in 2016 as a Research Professor working with and helping to build the research journeys and careers of PhD students, early and mid-career academic colleagues. I helped to develop the Creative Industries research cluster, co-founded the BCU India Innovation Group, set up the Centre for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts (CEDIA) acting as its first Director, and served as our Faculty’s Interim Associate Dean for Research, Innovation and Enterprise.

Prior to joining BCU I have held teaching and research posts at other UK higher education institutions, including the University of Manchester, University of Portsmouth, Cardiff University, and the University of Birmingham.  

Academic expertise

I work across core and specialist areas of film, media and cultural studies and creative industries studies and practice. I have research specialisms in Bollywood cinema, Black British representation, popular music, diasporic and transnational media, television and new media studies, and in cultural theory and qualitative research methods as applied to popular culture and creative industries research. 

More recently, and together with colleagues at the University of Warwick and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, I have also become interested in immersive art, AI and machine learning technologies and how these can be used by artists to produce new creative outputs, while engaging with some of the pressing issues of our time.

I feel blessed to be able to work across global academia, the creative economy, and together with students, artists and creatives to explore the world and what makes us human.

Industry connections

Many of my externally funded research projects have seen me collaborate with creative industry partners, artists, and creatives from the UK and around the world. This has included working together from the outset of the design of research projects through to their delivery and completion of creative outputs and scholarly publications.  A couple of these projects include:

I was principal investigator on the AHRC and Innovate UK funded project India-UK Creative Industries at 75: Challenges and Opportunities (Feb - Oct 2022). I worked with PGDAV College, University of Delhi, India, and 30 artists from India and the UK across the creative economies of screen industries, live performance and fashion, producing over 15 new creative outputs.

As Co-Investigator I was also part of a major £4 million AHRC-funded consortia project entitled Creative Multilingualism. This was a four-year research programme as part of the AHRCs Open World Research Initiative (OWRI) which began in July 2016 and was led by the University of Oxford (PI). The project's other university consortia partners included Cambridge, Pittsburgh, Reading and SOAS, in addition to numerous cultural partners. I led the research strand on Languages in the Creative Economy and developed the Slanguages research project.

Current projects

I am currently working on my Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2022-2025), working towards my next book on ‘E-Bollywood: Popular Hindi Cinema in the Age of New Media’. This research is assessing how the growth of social networking sites like Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and the rise of streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, have changed the way Bollywood movies are made, marketed and viewed.

Studying your subject in Birmingham

Birmingham is a dynamic city with people having made it their homes from across the world. This makes for an exciting city region that invites you in to consider its challenges and possibilities across local, global, national, and diasporic cultures, not least through the use of new technologies and research methods.