About

Aniko Imre, Ph.D., is a Professor of Cinematic Arts in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies and a member of the faculty advisory board in the Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) Division at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on comparative media studies and global communication, with particular emphasis on (post)socialist media industries and cultures, the politics of popular culture, digital surveillance, and identity. She has authored or co-edited seven books, including the monographs TV Socialism and Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe, as well as the collection Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race. Imre co-edits the Palgrave book series Global Cinemas and serves on the boards of several academic journals. Her recent research examines political storytelling and worldbuilding in media cultures influenced by 'entrepreneurial authoritarianism.' She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship and a Mellon Mentoring Award. Her scholarly work has been supported by fellowships from Fulbright, Central European University, Harvard Radcliffe, and others.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Law
• Artificial Intelligence
• Literature
• Development economics
• Art
• Gender studies
• Political economy
• Psychology
• Economics
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Interview with Mária Takács, documentary filmmaker, journalist and activist, founding member of the first Hungarian lesbian organization, Labrisz.

  Journal of Lesbian Studies · 2025-08-08 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Anikó Imre conducted this interview with Hungarian documentary filmmaker, journalist and activist Mária Takács specifically for the special issue entitled "Toward Central and Eastern European Lesbian Studies." We discuss Takács's pivotal work for lesbian, LGBTQ, and more broadly, underrepresented minority rights and representations over the past two decades. We address how her three main areas of engagement have overlapped and integrated and how this work has become increasingly precarious against the backdrop of the Orbán government's repressive policies since 2010. We pay special attention to Takács's pioneering work as a filmmaker, from making the first documentary about the secret lives of lesbians under socialism to her latest, participatory project, a scripted web series about lesbian romance in a politically hostile atmosphere.

  PublisherDOI

• Midsommar and the production of white fantasy

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2024-05-27 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter takes the ‘folk horror’ film Midsommar (2019) as a case study against which to analyse cultural manifestations of whiteness in terms of their global and historical interconnections and in relation to the worldwide resurgence of white supremacy. American director Ari Aster’s film adopts the folk horror sub-formula of clueless Anglo-American travellers descending on exotic foreign locations, only to be brutally punished for their exploitative attitude in a symbolic gesture of postcolonial justice. Instead of sending its protagonists to Asia or Africa, however, the film’s group of visitors, including two young anthropology scholars, arrive in the symbolic heart of European whiteness, Hälsingland, to participate in the Swedish folk-mythic rituals of Midsommar. The film’s aesthetic and representational dimensions offer plentiful commentary on whiteness as an inherently violent but also nostalgically mourned European concept that is operationalised through seemingly innocuous folk-cultural traditions. And the chapter focuses on an aspect of the film that has received only passing mention: that it was shot on location outside Budapest, where the entire ‘Swedish’ set was built. The production employed a Hungarian crew and Hungarian cast in non-starring roles, who impersonated the ‘Swedish’ folks of the ritual gathering. I examine the media service industry as a counterpart to and an indispensable layer of understanding how European whiteness has been produced and has circulated within interconnected cultural and industrial-economic forms.

  PublisherDOI

• Illiberal white fantasies and Netflix’s<i>The Witcher</i>

  Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies · 2023 · 25 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of racial violence, and that connect Eastern and Western European manifestations of white innocence. This racialised connection highlights a relationship between the two Europes which hinges on mutual projections, which lives in narratives that have sustained schizophrenic national self-definitions in the eastern region and that have propped up the stability of national self-definitions within the western core. I zoom in on the current Polish and Hungarian right-wing populist regimes’ claims of racial exceptionalism by pointing to the ways in which locations in the east of the EU function as a resource for white innocence in the transnational media industries. I look closely at the relationship between the political-economic and discursive-cultural dimensions of white innocence through a case study of The Witcher franchise, based on Polish source material for a Netflix fantasy series, whose first season was shot primarily in Hungary. The Witcher involves multiple crossings where Eastern European national fantasies and global corporate fantasies of diversity and democracy converge in white innocence. These meeting points produce a racial and economic interface against which we can observe how whiteness operates in the regional networks of racial capitalism.

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• SPY FROM THE CLOUD:

  Indiana University Press eBooks · 2022-06-21 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Frontmatter

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2022-06-10

  book-chapterOpen access

  The series Eastern European Screen Cultures publishes critical studies on the screen cultures that have marked the socialist and post-socialist spaces in Europe. It aims to unveil current phenomena and untold histories from this region to account for their specificity and integrate them into a wider conception of European and world cinema.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Secrets Without Agents: From Big Brother to Big Data

  ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania) · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Spies have made a remarkable international comeback in popular film and TV since the early 2010s. Many of the recent TV series and feature films that revolve around spying and surveillance also draw on the Cold War for historical parallels, antecedents or representational elements to convey a decidedly contemporary sense of ambiguity, allegory and dystopia that is associated with the global crisis of neo-liberal markets, the erosion of trust in democratic institutions and the emergence of autocratic leaders worldwide. Originally delivered as CARGC 2019 Distinguished Lecture in Global Communication, CARGC Paper 15 by Anikó Imre probes this association further and ask why and how the memory of the Cold War is resurrected through its favored genre to lend a representative platform to current, globally shared structures of feeling. On the one hand, the implied historical parallels yield a contemporary reevaluation of the Cold War as much more complex and more thoroughly networked among national and other agents than the triumphant Western narrative of two warring empires has long suggested. On the other hand, the comparison between Cold War and contemporary manifestations of spies and spying guide us to understand significant recent transformations in the nature, effects, and experience of surveillance. The comparison between Cold War and contemporary spies highlights a radical transformation of the technological and media networks themselves from nation-based broadcast networks to streaming platforms that are themselves active facilitators of a more widespread, insidious, and inescapable sense of surveillance. In particular, Imre argues that there is a synergy between the structures of broadcast television and Cold War representations of spying on the one side and contemporary, digital, SVOD delivery and the structures of spying represented by streaming services on the other. This feedback loop between spying as content and technology compels a serious critical and historical understanding and requires creative pedagogies of interruption.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Mediated Shame of Class and Poverty Across Europe

  Springer eBooks · 2021 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  DOI

• Populist masculinities and transnational feminism: thoughts after <i>Chernobyl</i>

  Feminist Media Studies · 2021-04-22 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Transnational feminist media studies has a prominent role to play in tackling the normativization of binary gender and sexuality templates that lend coherence to the Global Right’s epistemological universe. Feminist scholars can begin to interrupt the traveling script at some of its most vulnerable points. The brief example here is the glaring divide between populist leaders’ seemingly invulnerable political masculinities and their actual weakness, which the HBO mini-series allegorically exposes.

  PublisherDOI

• Editorial: Race and TV in Europe

  VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture · 2021-12-01 · 2 citations

  editorialOpen accessSenior author

  This special issue on race and European television will begin the work of documenting and understanding the many ways in which television has both perpetuated and critically interrogated racialized regimes in Europe and in European countries’ ongoing relationships to their postcolonial geopolitical spheres. We have a dual goal for this issue: to break the silence and begin to describe, both retroactively and with a look to the future, television’s specific roles in visualizing, naturalizing, subverting and silencing race in Europe; and to account for the enduring reluctance to do this work in the first place.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• TV Socialism

  2020-09-25 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In TV Socialism, Anikó Imre provides an innovative history of television in socialist Europe during and after the Cold War. Rather than uniform propaganda programming, Imre finds rich evidence of hybrid aesthetic and economic practices, including frequent exchanges within the region and with Western media, a steady production of varied genre entertainment, elements of European public service broadcasting, and transcultural, multi-lingual reception practices. These televisual practices challenge conventional understandings of culture under socialism, divisions between East and West, and the divide between socialism and postsocialism. Taking a broad regional perspective encompassing Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Imre foregrounds continuities between socialist television and the region's shared imperial histories, including the programming trends, distribution patterns, and reception practices that extended into postsocialism. Television, she argues, is key to understanding European socialist cultures and to making sense of developments after the end of the Cold War and the enduring global legacy of socialism

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Greg de Cuir

  Estonian Academy of Arts

  108 shared

• Pavle Levi

  Université Libre de Bruxelles

  108 shared

• Bethany Bryson

  James Madison University

  36 shared

• Ken Swee- Ney

  New York University

  36 shared

• Aditya Shankar

  Delft University of Technology

  36 shared

• Simrat Kaur Brar

  36 shared

• Rosie Thomas

  36 shared

• S. Redmond

  The Asiatic Society of Mumbai

  36 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Cinematic Arts

  University of Southern California

Awards & honors

• Inaugural Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist…
• Mellon Mentoring Award for mentoring graduate students from…
• Fulbright fellowship
• Central European University Institute of Advanced Studies fe…
• National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NC…