About

Charlotte Brunsdon 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 recently acted as Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded 'The Projection Project' (2014-2018), based at Warwick. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

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 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 argued for the importance of the study of television 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. Television Cities (2018) suggests that scholarship about the audio-visual city should attend to the urban images and rhythms of the many television cities. This book has a central chapter on London which complements my earlier London in Cinema, and I am working on a book which will extend attention to the broader territories of British film and television. I have recently edited a collection of Stuart Hall’s writings on the media, History of the Present, which will be published by Duke University Press in 2021 as part of their series of Hall’s selected writings.

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)
• 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.

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.