Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal is a film and media historian. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the AHRC-DFG "Relocating Filmstrips, Remapping Europe" project, a collaboration between the University of St Andrews and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth century British educational and visual culture, non-theatrical film and media, film technologies, science and cinema, colonial cinema, media materiality.

Anushrut's current book project, Watch and Learn: How the Invention of Cinema Changed British Education (Book Proposal Under Review at Exeter University Press) reveals how cinema's invention in the 1890s had a transformative impact on British education. The potential of this new medium on knowledge-making provoked both excitement and consternation, while its subsequent employment and abjuration in instruction would, in turn, impact the form and function of other teaching aids (panorama, print, and magic lantern projection). Drawing on a rich trove of primary materials on law, morality, science, religion, and colonialism, the book offers a previously-uncharted historical account of the formative. It also engages with a variety of institutions including the British Parliament, the London County Council, the Royal Geographical Society, the Church Army, and the India Office, while also spotlighting new perspectives on educational media (from forgotten film catalogue writers to overlooked missionaries and scientists). Investigating both use (and non-use) of educational cinema, Watch and Learn meticulously reveals the critical legacies of late-Victorian and Early-Edwardian visual education and shows how these early initiatives, battles, and debates still influence teaching and learning today.

Building on his research Anushrut works on the history of the filmstrip as an instructional and political media technology. He is currently also researching glass as a media object. Here he is examining what the material and metaphorical uses of glass in British screen media – film, television, digital media – reveal about the class hierarchies, colonial legacies, gender discriminations, and environmental degradations embedded within British visual culture.

Anushrut is also a Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy, and the Book Review Editor at the journal of Early Popular Visual Culture. He previously worked as an Associate Lecturer at St Andrews (2023-2025). He has also delivered guest lectures and led seminars at other Universities, such as Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main in Germany, and Jamia Milia Islamia and St Stephens College in India.