Emilija Talijan's research focusses on sound, technology and the body. Her work argues for the political dimensions of cinematic listening and the impact of sonic representations with regards to ideology, gender, sexuality, national formations and the nonhuman. She is the author of Resonant Bodies in Contemporary European Art Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). This book explores how contemporary directors have used sound to imagine and appeal to their spectators as listeners. It examines how transitions in sound practice within digital cinema have allowed for a greater degree of sonic detail and density, thereby increasing noises and the audibility of bodies they represent. It is the first book to significantly apply ideas of listening and noise from sound studies to the study of art cinema and asks what it means to become ‘all ears’ in our experience of film.

Dr Talijan is currently developing a monograph on Foley sound, which will bring a film theoretical perspective to the art and craft of Foley, examining how the unseen materials of the foley studio underpin the world created by the film and the interactions between different bodies on screen. She is the editor of the special issue 'Foley Sound: New Theories and Approaches', published in The Soundtrack 2024. 

Another project in development concerns the engagement of visual mediums with sensors and technologies that pick up on a body's non-visual signals: how do bodies become visible through the heat or sounds they emit, the vibrations they cause? And what are the stakes of these forms of visiblity?