Monia Acciari

Dr Acciari studied Film Studies at University of Bologna (Italy), where she obtained her BA and a first MA in Film History, working on Federico Fellini’s unpublished radio plays. She obtained a second MA in New Media Management from the European Institute of Design in Milan. Dr Acciari's doctoral research was conducted at the University of Manchester with a fully funded AHRC project entitled “Indo-Italian screens and the Aesthetic of Emotions”.

Her principal research interests lie in the areas of Film and Cultural studies. Her areas of research are: film festivals; popular Hindi cinema; new-wave Indian cinema; Transnational cinema and South Asian diasporic cinema; cinema and ethnicity; film history and ethnicity; audience studies; film restoration and preservation; and cultural theory. Dr Acciari is particularly interested in qualitative research methods, and the use of sociological and ethnographic methodologies as applied to popular culture, in addition to historical and archival research.

Dr Acciari is the Associate Director of the Leicester Asian Film Festival, and Principal Investigator of the research and diasporic community engagement project: Building Audiences. Besides being part of several international research networks, she is also a writer for the online magazine Festivalists, where she mostly contributes with articles on Indian cinema and Indian Film Festivals.