Dr. Martin Pumphrey

Teaching Fellow in Film Studies

Contact Details: Department of Film and Television Studies, Milburn House, Milburn Hill Road, University of Warwick, CV4 7HS, UK

Tel : +44 24 7657 3041

Fax : +44 24 7652 4757

Email : martin dot pumphrey at warwick dot ac dot uk

Martin Pumphrey’s main teaching and research area is Hollywood cinema from the emergence of the studios through to the present and he has a specific interest in film’s relationship to early 20th century popular modernism. In particular he has focused on questions about film genres (Westerns, Musicals, Gangster films, and documentary for example) and debates about audiences and audience behaviour. In teaching and writing he has tended to use close textual analysis of film style, structure, tone and performance as a way of gaining access to particular historical moments and debates. A recent interest has been film comedy and the implications of the links between (stage) traditions of comic performance and film. His background in Literature and (American) Cultural Studies informs his approach to film debates.

Publications

“The Games We Play(ed) : TV Westerns, Memory and Masculinity” in Anna Gough-Yates and Bill Osgerby eds, Analysing the TV Action Series, (Routledge, 2001)

“Why Do Cowboys Wear Hats in the Bath ?” Critical Quarterly, (October 1989). Reprinted in Douglas Pye and Ian Cameron eds The Movie Book of the Western, (Cameron Books, 1995)

“Masculinity in The Western” in Ed Buscombe ed., The BFI Companion to the Western (Andre Deutsch, London, 1988)

“The Flapper, The Housewife and the Making of Modernity”, Cultural Studies, Vol 1, No. 2, (May 1987), pp. 179-194

“Play, Fantasy and Strange Laughter : Stevie Smith’s Uncomfortable Poetry”, Critical Quarterly, Vol 28, No. 3 (Autumn 1986), pp 85-96. Reprinted in Sanford Sternlicht ed. In Search of Stevie Smith, (Syracuse University Press, 1991), pp 97-113.

Teaching

Martin Pumphrey’s teaching has included the Introduction to Film Studies that is open to all students in the university as well as a module on Basic Film Criticism and modules on Hollywood Cinema from the studio period through to the “independents” of new/contemporary Hollywood.