About

Charlotte Brunsdon is currently writing about twenty-first century audio visual landscapes in Britain, as well as continuing research on London in film and television and British television crime series. She stopped teaching and accepting research students in 2021, after having taught both undergraduate and postgraduate students at Warwick for many years, having previously taught in the Art School at Sheffield City Polytechnic. Charlotte Brunsdon is a Fellow of the British Academy, studied English at University College London and completed her Phd at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Birmingham. While at Warwick, Charlotte Brunsdon has taught visiting semesters in the USA at Duke University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and been visiting scholar at other universities including Stockholm, Queensland, Southern California, New York, Northwestern, and Murcia. She has undertaken a number of collaborative projects, including co-founding the Midlands Television Research Group and acting as Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded ‘Projection Project’ (2014-2018), based at Warwick.

Recent publications include an edited collection of Stuart Hall’s writings on the media, History of the Present, published by Duke University Press as part of their series of Hall’s selected writings, with the introduction available here:

‘History of the Present', Introduction to Stuart Hall: Writings on Media
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-1471-3_601.pdf

‘This is not a cinema’ comes from the Projection Project, and uses interviews with cinema projectionists about the transition to digital to explore the invisible labour of projection and the ways in which the digital transition affects our understanding of what cinema is. As AHRC-funded research, this article is open access:

“This is not a cinema”: the projectionist's tale', Screen 60.4 (2019): 527-54, https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/60/4/527/5673449

I am also beginning to publish some short pieces from the landscapes of Britain project:

‘Knife works: contesting narratives of knife crime in Britain’ in Urban Violence, (London: British Academy, 2021), pps 38-43, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publications/urban-violence/ 

‘Council House Art’ History Workshop Journal 88 (Autumn 2019): 288-298,
https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbz035/5556402 

Research Interests

All of my research, across a range of topics which range from London as a cinematic city to television crime series, is concerned with the relationship between particular texts and broader cultural contexts. I’m interested in the ways in which film and television tell stories and make images which speak of more than themselves, and what can be learned by paying close attention to texts that are often considered unimportant or trivial. I have argued for the importance of the study of television and worked with John Caughie to edit the book series, Oxford Television Studies, and with Lynn Spigel to document the emergence of Feminist Television Criticism in two anthologies. My 2018 book Television Cities (2018) suggests that scholarship about the audio-visual city – so quick to move from cinema to digital – should attend to the urban images and rhythms of the many television cities which fill our living rooms. This book has a central chapter on London which complements my earlier London in Cinema, and my current project extends attention to the broader territories and audio-visual landscapes of British film and television in the twenty-first century.

Selected publications

Books

• Television Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore (Durham N.C: Duke University Press, 2018)
• Law and Order BFI Television Classic (London: Palgrave/ Macmillan, 2010)
• London in Cinema: the cinematic city since 1945 (London: BFI, 2007)
• The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)
• Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes (London: Routledge, 1997)
• Feminist Television Criticism 2^nd edn, co- edited with Lynn Spigel (Open University Press, 2007; 1^st edn 1997, co-edited with D’Acci and Spigel)
• Films for Women (ed.) (London: British Film Institute, 1987)
• Everyday Television: Nationwide (with David Morley) (London: BFI, 1978)

Recent Articles, Chapters and Edited Journals

• '"This is Not A Cinema": The Projectionist's Tale', Screen 60.4 (2019), pp. 527-547. (Open access)
• 'Council House Art', History Workshop Journal 88 (Autumn 2019), pp. 288-298.
• ‘London in transition: sites of melancholy’, in Pam Hirsch and Chris O’Rourke (eds.) London on Film: social change and the cinema (London: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 221-238.
• Journal of British Cinema and Television 15.1 (2018), ‘The Projection Issue’, co-edited with Jon Burrows and Richard Wallace.
• ‘The cinematic and the televisual city: south London revisited’, in Francois Penz and Richard Koeck (eds.) Cinematic Urban Geographies (New York: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 223-243.
• ‘Bad sex, target culture and the anti-terror state: new contexts for the 21st century British television police series’, in Ruth McElroy (ed.) Contemporary British Television Crime Drama: Cops on the Box (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 27-39
• 'On being made history',Cultural Studies 29.1 (2015), pp. 88-99
• 'Television crime series, women police and fuddy-duddy feminism', Feminist Media Studies 13.4 (2013), pp. 375-395.
• 'The attractions of the cinematic city', Screen 53.3 (2012), pp. 209-227.
• Journal of British Cinema and Television 6.2 (2009), ‘Screen Londons’ themed issue, edited with Jon Burrows.