Dr Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes
Dr Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes is an Official Fellow and Postgraduate Tutor at Clare Hall, and a Member of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, University of Cambridge. She is also a Member of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI).
Her primary work is as a visual anthropologist and digital humanities scholar and centres on new theoretical models drawing on visual culture, cognitive psychology, amateur and new media, and memory studies. She considers the construction of racial, gender, and political identities in visual (mostly amateur and new) records. In both her research and teaching she has made extensive use of and assisted with the establishment of online film archives of amateur (colonial) media such as Images of Empire (Bristol, UK), Colonial Film (London, UK), and the online film archive held by the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge.
She regularly supervises for the Department of Social Anthropology, the Department of Sociology, and for Pembroke College International Programmes.
Dr Motrescu-Mayes is the founder of Amateur Cinema Studies Network – one of the few international projects promoting amateur cinema/media studies.
Select publications
- Published extensively on issues of imperial visual culture, gender, and amateur and new media, including the following recent volumes:
- The Routledge Companion to Amateur Film and Media, ed., London: Routledge (forthcoming 2027)
- 9.5mm Film and Participatory Media before the Digital Age(eds. with Z. Burgess), London: Routledge (forthcoming 2026)
- De-Illustrating the History of the British Empire. Preliminary Perspectives, New York: Routledge, 2021
- Amateur Media: Film, Digital Media and Participatory Cultures (with S. Aasman), London: Routledge, 2019
- British women amateur filmmakers: national memories and global identities (with H. Norris Nicholson), Edinburgh University Press, 2018
- Visual Histories of South Asia (with Marcus Banks), Delhi: Primus Ratna Sagar, 2017
