Zakir Hossain Raju

Zakir Hossain Raju is a senior lecturer in communication and cultural studies at Monash University, Malaysia. He was awarded a PhD in cinema studies from La Trobe University, Melbourne, and has since worked at RMIT, La Trobe, University of Dhaka, and Independent University (Bangladesh). His research is on Asian media, cultural translation and diaspora communities, and he is planning to research the media use of Asian Australians during 2009-10. He is particularly interested in cultural texts, especially cinematic ones, and their relationships with postcolonial nationhood and identity formation in non-Western contexts. He is widely published in South Asian cinema studies, and has a forthcoming book from Routledge focused on Bangladeshi cinema. Zakir has also developed an interest in the media portrayal of religion, such as Islam, and shifted his research focus on to the representation of Muslim identity as well as the interconnections between Islam and popular culture in Malaysian and Bangladeshi contexts. In addition to his academic work, Zakir is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and has worked on material concerning women's rights, elections and democratic movements, and intercultural Japanese-Bangladeshi families in Tokyo.

Zakir's new research project ‘Digital Cinema Across Asia’ on which he is collaborating with professor Kim Soyoung (Korean National University of Arts, Seoul) in 2008-2009 also received a collaborative research grant from the Asian Scholarship Foundation (ASF). He has also been invited to serve as a jury member in Melbourne International Film Festival during 1996-98 and Vesoul International Film Festival in France in 2008.