Communications, Culture & Media
Research
The researchers in Media, Culture and Society have a long-standing research focus on media history and theory alongside politics and gender. More recently we have developed new capacities in digital media and mediations. Our distinctive new research focus on digital media and mediations has investigated the interdisciplinary affinities between media studies, translation studies and software studies as a means of charting new territory, opening a fresh line of research on media localisation and accessibility, and developing our collaborations with industry partners.
Media History and Theory
Colleagues working in this area explore a wide range of themes. From the history of radio criticism to digital filmmaking, researchers examine media practices and artefacts from technical, cultural and interpersonal perspectives. Colleagues have expertise in the psychodynamics of contemporary entanglements between identity, screen media objects and popular culture, have critically documented the wave of post-2000 transnational mergers and acquisitions in the television production sector and critically consider a range of media from the work of Jean-Luc Goddard to contemporary representations of vampires and zombies.
Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)
Twenty-first century film and television is overwhelmed with images of the undead. Vampires and zombies have often been seen as oppositional: one alluring, the other repellent; one seductive, the other infectious. This book challenges these popular assumptions and reveals the increasing interconnection of undead genres. Exploring how the figure of the vampire has been infused with the language of science, disease, and apocalypse, while the zombie text has increasingly been influenced by the trope of the ‘reluctant’ vampire, this book shows how both archetypes are actually two sides of the same undead coin. When considered together they present a dystopian, sometimes apocalyptic, vision of twenty-first century existence.
French Cinema
Michael Witt is an internationally recognised expert on French cinema and particularly on the work of Jean-Luc Godard. His publications on Godard include the Jean-Luc Godard: Documents volume he co-edited for the Pompidou Centre in 2006, the expanded edition of The French Cinema Book (The British Film Institute, 2018) which he co-edited with Michael Temple (Birkbeck) and his monograph Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (Indiana University Press, 2013), which won the 2014 Limina Award for Best International Film Studies Book.
Politics and Gender
This field of research seeks to question and critique existing representations and practices and to create new spaces, theories and figures. Colleagues work across film, journalism, linguistics and cultural studies. While none of the work here is typical, as it ranges from research on ageing female celebrities to representations of the British suffrage movement, colleagues share an interest in genders, feminism, female identity and creativity, representation, ideology and power.
The New Man (2016)
Josh Appignanesi & Devorah Baum
A married couple (writer Devorah Baum & filmmaker Appignanesi) turn the camera on themselves as they undergo the ordeal of becoming parents in our era of IVF, late reproduction, and the crisis of masculinity. But when life-threatening complications hit, they’re tested to the brink. What emerges is an intimate, moving portrait of a generation going through a revolution that no-one’s talking about.
Representation of the British Suffrage Movement (Bloomsbury, 2015)
Looking at representations of suffrage campaigners' support of or opposition to military action, Kat Gupta uses a range of methodological approaches drawn from corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and CDA to examine how suffrage campaigners' different ideologies were conflated in The Times over a crucial time period for the movement - 1908 to 1914, leading up to the Representation of the People Act in 1918.
Digital Media and Mediations
Bringing together industry best practice and driving it forward, researchers in this area focus on understanding media and its impact and in developing new translation and localisation practises for both the film and videogaming industries. Colleagues work across technologies, time periods, disciplines and platforms in order to inform future practice and to critically evaluate current traditions.
Translation and Localisation in Video Games: Making Entertainment Software Global (Routledge, 2015)
In this multidisciplinary study of the translation and localisation of video games, Miguel Bernal-Merino offers a descriptive analysis of the videogame industry – understood as a global phenomenon in entertainment – and aims to explain the norms governing present industry practices, as well as game localisation processes. This book challenges some of the basic tenets of translation studies and proposes changes to established and unsatisfactory processes in the video game and language services industries.
Software Theory
Federica Frabetti's research focuses on the cultural and philosophical study of software, both within and outside of the university, at an international level and across disciplines. Her work, as encapsulated in her monograph Software Theory: A Cultural and Philosophical Study, engages in close readings of technical texts and computer code in order to show how software works and in what sense it can be considered constitutive of culture and even of human thought.
Research Staff
Impact
External Engagement
Research Projects
