Research

Our staff have research strengths in a number of key areas, including:

• British and American cinema and television history
• Women directors and the Hollywood film industry
• Popular culture, comics, and film serials
• East Asian cinemas
• European cinema
• Transnational cinema
• Film theory and philosophy
• Feminism, gender, and film
• Cinematic cities
• Film genres
• Cinema, diaspora and migration

We have a proven track record of publication in respected journals and with prestigious presses. We also actively pursue new ways of conducting and disseminating our research as widely as possible. This might involve setting up innovative interdisciplinary collaborations with other academics, technical specialists and art institutions, curating major international exhibitions, hosting events targeted at the general public, creating interactive websites, and so on. Recent projects include Dr Lin Feng's ‘Shanghai Made in Hollywood’ and Dr Claire Jenkins's '$100 Million Women: Hollywood's Women Directors'.

We work extensively as peer-reviewers for publishing houses such as Yale, Manchester, Edinburgh and Routledge, as well as for more than a dozen international academic journals.

We take key advisory roles for important institutions and organisations such as the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST). Our reach beyond academia can be further underlined by media appearances on radio and television, such as Sky Arte (Italy) and BBC Leicester. 

We encourage PhD applications in any of our key research areas. However, we are also keen to take on topics outside any one individual’s direct area of speciality, and we regularly set up PhD supervisory teams that allow for unusual and innovative topic combinations according to the student’s interests, so do please send us your enquiry.

Please see individual staff profiles for further details of research activities and publications.

Research projects

Find out more about our featured research projects: