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Malini Guha

Associate Professor; Graduate Supervisor

• B.A. (University of Toronto), M.A. (York University), PhD (University of Warwick)
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Malini Guha is interested in supervising students and postdocs on migration, cinema and media, world cinema, cities in cinema and race/representation in cinema and media.

Malini Guha (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Film Studies. She is a settler of South Asian descent. Guha’s research interests are expansive, extending from a longstanding commitment to thinking and writing about film and the city as well diasporic and postcolonial cinemas to more recent turns toward the subject of world cinema and other moving image practices, including public projection.

Guha is cross-appointed with the Institute for Studies in Art and Culture and is affiliated with Migration and Diaspora Studies. She is the current holder of the Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (2025-27). Her project, “Traction, Flight Becoming: Geographical Thinking Across Disciplines” will facilitate and nurture geographical thinking across disciplinary divides.

Guha is the author of  (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and co-editor (with Elizabeth Evans) of  (Routledge University Press, 2023). Her essays have been published in Feminist Media Histories, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, NECSUS, Screening the Past,PUBLIC: Art \Culture| Ideas and the Journal of British Cinema and Television. As a contributing editor for the online journal Mediapolis, she writes a regular column, ‘Screening Canada’, where she explores aspects of Canada’s mediated place-making in relation to recent issues concerning its global role and domestic negotiation of racial and ethnic difference.

Guha assumed the role of Resident Critic for Knot Projections 2019: Imagining Publics, a public projection program launched by Knot Project Space and SAW Video (2018-19). Under the leadership and direction of SAW Video’s former Programming Director Neven Lochhead, she worked with five artists who produced moving image work that was projected on multiple sites across Ottawa. She wrote an essay about the project that was commissioned by Lochhead and published in  (eds. Erica Stein, Brendan Kredell and Germain R. Halegoua, 2022).

In 2019, she was an invited speaker for the Sydney Asian Art Series. As part of this series, she programmed and introduced a tribute screening for the late Bengali director, Mrinal Sen, held at the New South Wales Art Gallery. In 2024, she conducted a career-spanning interview with filmmaker Deepa Mehta as part of the Canadian Master’s series at the International Film Festival of Ottawa. 

Guha has engaged in a series of collaborative projects over the last several years involving colleagues at �Ӱ�ԭ��. She was co-chair of the Racialized and Indigenous Faculty Alliance (with Professor Leila Angod) at �Ӱ�ԭ�� from 2022-2024. As part of this role, she co-organized two summer institutes as well as a session on alternative grading as part of Inclusion Week at �Ӱ�ԭ��. In 2023, she, along with Professors Gül Kale and Kathy Armstrong, co-taught a course on the subject of intersectional approaches to race and representation in the arts that spanned the disciplines of film studies, art and architectural history and music. 

Guha is currently working on a research project that revisits a number of longstanding questions and debates about cinema and reality through the lens of traction, fight and becoming. She was awarded a FASS Mid-Career Research Grant (2021) for this project as well as a SSHRC Insight Development Grant titled “On Traction: Moving Images and Their Realities” (2023-2025). As part of her SSHRC grant, she commissioned artist, curator and educator Neven Lochhead to produce  (2024), a residency and exhibition platform based in Tamworth, Ontario. 

She is one of two first-time North American editors of the journal Screen and is also on the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. She serves as CUASA councillor for the School of Studies in Art and Culture and was a member of Collective Bargaining (2023-2024). 

Select Publications

Monographs

From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in the Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

Edited Collections

London as Screen Gateway (Routledge University Press, 2023), co-edited with Elizabeth Evans.

Essays in Journals and Edited Collections

“Border as Method in a Film and Media Studies Context” in  (MLA, 2025), eds. Masha Salazkina and Yumna Siddiqi, pp. 39-47.

“Collisions, Echoes, Swallowings”,&�Բ�����;PUBLIC: Art|Culture|Ideas 70: The Weather (November 2024).

“Outside In: Twilight City and the Birth of Global London” in Global London on Screen: Visitors, Cosmopolitans and Migratory Visions of a Superdiverse City (Manchester University Press, 2023), eds. Keith B. Wagner and François-Roland Lack, pp. 72-92.

“Piccadilly Lights as Pandemic Portal? The Case of CIRCA Art’s Public Projection Series” in London as Screen Gateway (Routledge Press, 2023), eds. Elizabeth Evans and Malini Guha.

“Public Projection as Traction: The Case of Imagining Publics (2019)” in Routledge Companion to Media and the City(Routledge Press, 2022), eds. Erica Stein, Brendan Kredell and Germain R. Halegoua, pp. 167-177.

“Assemblage, Performance, Precarity: Moving through the archive in Filipa César’s Spell Reel (2017) and Conakry (2013)”,&�Բ�����;Feminist Media Histories no. 3, vol. 7 (Summer 2021): 82-103.

“Vaguely Visible: Intersectional Politics in Bertrand Bonello’s ���dz��ٳܰ�������” in Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures, eds. Paula J. Massood, Angel Daniel Matos and Pamela Robertson Wojcik (Duke University Press, 2021), pp. 262-274.

“Adventure Cinema in the Age of Austerity: the case of Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights (2015) trilogy” in Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice, eds. James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati (Routledge, 2021), pp. 211-227.

“World Cinema 3.0? The “World as Backdrop” for a Multimedial Age”,&�Բ�����;Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 29, no. 2 (Fall 2020): 37-51.

“The Cinematic Revival of Low London in the Age of Speculative Urbanism” in London on Film: The City and Social Change, eds. Pamela Hirsch and Chris O’Rourke and Pamela Hirsch (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 205-220.

“Cinephilia and the City: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Bengali Cinema” in Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media, eds. Johan Anderson and Lawrence Webb (Wallflower Press, 2016), pp. 121-142

“Narratives of Return in the Films of Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambety” in After Exile: Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema, ed. Rebecca Prime (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2014), pp. 229- 249.