Research News

Keep an eye on this page for regular updates about the Department of Film and Television Studies' research events and activities...

NEW! Click here for an interview with V.F. Perkins in the Cinema Eight and a Half in Saarbruecken

Recent News

The seminal periodical Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, which ran from 1962 to 2000 and played a hugely influential role in the development of academic film studies, has been relaunched in October 2010 as an online journal jointly hosted and edited by the Universities of Warwick and Reading. Click here to access the second issue. 

Events

On October 8th 2011, The History of Television for Women in Britain team are holding a public event at the Phoenix Arts centre, Leicester entitled 'Career Girls on the Small Screen'. The day will present screenings of key British television programmes from the 1960s and 1970s which showed the changing relationship between women, work and the urban (long before Sex and the City and Mad Men) including The Rag Trade (1961), Compact (1962), and The Liver Birds (1969). The screenings will be introduced by the research team, and the day will include presentations by writers and actors (names to be confirmed) as well as archivists and academics. In the evening, there will be a screening of Made in Dagenham (2010). A timetable for the day will be posted here closer to the date of the event.

The department has recently hosted several major conferences:

  • In April 2011, the department held a day symposium 'Archives of the Audio-Visual, as part of the 'Histories of the Digital Future' project. The workshop opened with a presentation by Professor Carolyn Steedman of the Warwick History Department, and also included presentation of research snapshots by postgraduate students in the department of Film and Television Studies. The afternoon saw Professor Charles Barr (University College, Dublin), Dr Rachel Moseley (University of Warwick) and Dr Amy Holdsworth (University of Glasgow) reflect on their own encounters with the archive and the museum.

  • The University of Warwick, with the support of its Humanities Research Centre and the British Society of Aesthetics, recently hosted Film-Philosophy III: the third annual conference of the Film-Philosophy journal, 15-17 July 2010. Click here for further information.

  • Where Does History Happen? On the dispersal of contemporary histories of the moving image. Day symposium: Millburn House, room 028 Department of Film and Television Studies/Humanities Research Centre (HRC)/ Department of German Studies. May 20 2010. This event was a joint initiative organised by Erica Carter and Charlotte Brunsdon that linked the HRC Seminar on Film and History and the Department of Film and Television Studies project ‘Histories of the Digital Future’. The day workshop brought together historians of the audio-visual in and from different contexts, and attempted to map some of the changing locations of the history of the moving image in the twenty-first century. Contributors to the event included Hans-Michael Bock (Cinegraph Research Insitut, Hamburg), Erica Carter (Warwick), Ben Highmore (University of Sussex), Adrian Martin (Monash University, Melbourne), Therese Davis (Monash University) Sarah Street (University of Bristol) and Helen Wheatley (Warwick).

  • In February 2010 the department hosted the one-day interdisciplinary conference 'Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking CinemaScope': The Spectacle of Technology in Screen Media. This conference presented a wide-ranging study of spectacularised screen technologies: exploring instances where focus is drawn to the medium rather than its content. It featured papers from an array of disciplines, spanning subjects that range from before the birth of cinema to the digital future. Keynote Speakers: Alison Griffiths (CUNY); William Boddy (CUNY); Helen Wheatley: (University of Warwick)

  • In April 2009, the Departments of Film and Television Studies and History organised a research network 'The Future of Fashion Studies: A Fashion Network' in the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information can be found here.

  • In March 2009, the department hosted a conference entitled 'Making and Remaking Classic Television'. More information can be found here.
  • 'Beginnings and Endings in Film, Films and Film Studies', held on 13 June 2008. Click here for information. A conference report has now been published, in the winter 2008 edition of Screen (available online here).
  • 'In the Shadow of Empire: The Post-Imperial Urban Imaginaries of London and Paris', held on 17 May 2008. Click here for a report.
  • 'Television, the Archive and the Document: A Symposium', held in May 2008.
  • 'Marketing the Movies: Promotion, Advertising and Film Studies', 24th February 2007. Click here for information.

Other News

  • V.F. Perkins' seminal Film as Film (1972) was spotlighted in the Times Higher Education slot on 'The Canon' in February 2010. Click here to read James Clarke's tribute to the book and its impact on film scholarship.
  • Click here for information about the AHRC research project, 'A History of Television for Women in Britain: 1947-1989.'
  • Click here for information about the AHRC research project, 'The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians, 1918-2005' (Investigator - Professor Stephen Gundle).

Ongoing

Research Assessment Exercise 2008

In the recent national Research Assessment Exercise conducted by the Higher Education Funding Council, the Department was rated top in the country for Film and Television Studies for the quality of its research. It received a Grade Point Average rating of 3.5. It was one of only seven departments across all disciplines and all universities to have more than half of its research activities rated at 4* (defined by the RAE panel as ‘world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour’). The publications by staff members that were submitted to the panel were defined as ‘mainly world-leading or internationally excellent’. Established strengths in textual analysis were judged to have been complemented by historical and contextual methods evident especially in work on national cinemas and in cross-disciplinary work on place, identity and history.

The research environment of the Department received a 100% rating. Support for, and the success of, research students was labelled ‘outstanding’. AHRC PhD awards and completion rates were deemed ‘very high’ compared to the average. The Department was praised for the opportunities it offered postgraduate students to organise conferences, invite international speakers and to publish their work. The RAE panel also commented that international links have provided for regular exchanges and have fostered a context in which research in the Department is presented in wide contexts.

 

Film as Film