About

Charlotte Brunsdon holds BA in English from University College London and a Phd from Birmingham, where she first conducted research in the 1970s at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. 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, lecturing and presenting research at many other universities. She has been Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded ‘Projection Project’ (2014-2018), a founder member of the Midlands Television Research Group, and co-edited the book series, Oxford Television Studies, also serving on the editorial boards of Visual Culture in Britain, Film Quarterly, Screen and Feminist Media Studies.

Research profile

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 cultures use film and television to tell stories about themselves, and what can be learned by paying close attention to texts that are often considered unimportant or trivial. I have been involved in arguing for the importance of the study of television for most of my career and have 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. I have recently completed Television Cities, which will be published by Duke University Press in 2018. This book, which argues that scholarship about the audio-visual city should attend to the urban images and rhythms of the many television cities, has a central chapter on London which complements my earlier book on London in Cinema. I am now turning to extend my earlier study of the empty spaces of London-set British cinema to other regional landscapes and sites of dereliction in British film and television

The Projection Project

I have been working with other colleagues in the Department to explore and document changes in cinematic and extra-cinematic projection. We have been interviewing and photographing cinema projectionists as their role disappears with the digitisation of cinema, and also exploring some of the new ways in which projection is transforming public space and gallery exhibition. We have worked with the Flatpack Film Festival in Birmingham to present some of this work. More details about the project are available at our website, projectionproject.warwick.ac.uk, and some of our research findings are published in the Journal of British Film and Television vol.15.1 (January 2018).

Selected publications

• Television Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore (Durham N.C: Duke University Press, 2018).
• ‘Bad sex, target culture and the anti-terror state: new contexts for the twenty-first century British television police series’, in Ruth McElroy (ed.) Contemporary British Television Crime Drama (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017)
• ‘The cinematic and the televisual city: south London revisited’, in François Penz and Richard Koeck (eds.) Cinematic Urban Geographies (NY: Routledge, 2017)
• Law and Order BFI Television Classic (London: Palgrave/ Macmillan, 2010)
• ‘Screen Londons’ special issue, Journal of British Cinema and Television (edited with Jon Burrows), 6.2 2009
• 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)
• Everyday Television: Nationwide (with David Morley), London: BFI, 1978.

Teaching and supervision

I have developed and taught a wide range of courses, including ‘Modernity, Innovation and the Audio-visual Media’ and ‘The Cinema and the City’ for the Warwick MA , and undergraduate courses on ‘National Cinemas’ and ‘Film and Television Culture in Britain’. I have successfully supervised a large number of Phd theses on both film and television, and several former Phd students now have successful academic careers. Recent Phd topics include ‘Television and Memory’, ‘Cinema in post-apartheid South Africa‘, ‘Cinema’s home-movie mode’, ‘The secret state in British television series’, and ‘Remembering the 1970s’. I am always interested to hear from potential Phd students, particularly those wishing to work on British topics.

In 2017-8, I am teaching a third year option on British Film and Television Fiction.

National roles and professional associations

• Founding member of the Midlands Television Research Group
• Principal Investigator on The Projection Project