Dr Anna Viola Sborgi

Profile

I am a Research Fellow at The University of Leeds, UK, where I am currently working on the team project What’s On? Rethinking Class in the Television Industry. 

I joined Leeds in 2024 from University College Cork Ireland, where I was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Department of Film and Screen Media and completed the project  MEDIAHOMES: Housing Precarity on Screen in Ireland, Portugal and the UK from the 2008 crisis to COVID-19. With Elizabeth Patton, I co-edited the Alphaville Special Issue Home as a Site of Resistance (2023). My recent essays include: “Precarious Homes in Britain and France: Dance, Girlhood, and Escape in Fish Tank and Divines.” in Home Screens (Bloomsbury, 2023); “Housing Problems: Britain’s Housing Crisis and Documentary” in Cinema of Crisis (EUP, 2020), “Millennium Mills: London’s Last Post-Industrial Ruin as a Site of Production.” In London as Cinema and Media Gateway (2023).  I am a editorial board member and Student Voices editor at Mediapolis. A Journal of Cities and Culture and co-chair the Society of Cinema and Media Studies Urbanism/Geography/Architecture Scholarly Interest Group.My Film Studies PhD, ‘London’s Moving East’ – Film, Television, and Gentrification, 1980 to the present , investigated East London’s film, television and gentrification from the 1980s to the present. I was previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Genoa, Italy, where I worked on a project on post-2000 representations of high-rise and tower-block living within mediations of the London skyline.  My other publications include “Grenfell on Screen” in After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response (Pluto Press, 2019) and “Housing Problems: Britain’s Housing Crisis and Documentary” in Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (EUP, July 2020).

Research interests

film, media and urban space, housing and media, intersectional approaches to screen spaces