Research Affiliate
Dr Stephen Putnam Hughes is a specialist in the anthropology of media with a PhD from the University of Chicago. He taught for many years at SOAS, University of London, and served as the Film Officer and Film Festival Director at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) in London. He is currently engaged in the AHRC-funded research project Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections.
Dr Hughes specialises in the Anthropology of Media, with particular focus on cinema history, audience studies, documentary and ethnographic film, and visual anthropology. He has extensive regional expertise in Tamil-speaking South India, where he has lived and conducted fieldwork for over four decades. His research and publications explore the social and cultural dimensions of media, the arts, religion, and politics in the region.
Recent publication: Early cinema as photographic history: audience and theatrical space in colonial Bombay 1910–1915. Early Popular Visual Culture, 23(1–2), 100–125.
It is available open access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17460654.2025.2473369.
Instagram: @picture_postcard_empire
