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Dr Tom Whittaker

Reader and Associate Professor

Tel: +44 (0)24 761 50650

Fourth Floor, Faculty of Arts Building


Email: t dot whittaker at warwick dot ac dot uk

About

Tom joined Warwick in 2017 as an Associate Professor in Film and Spanish cultural studies. He served as Head of Hispanic Studies 2019-2021, before being promoted to the position of Reader in 2022. Prior to Warwick, Tom held lectureships in Hispanic Studies at the University Liverpool and Film Studies at Kingston University. Tom has also held visiting lectureships at the University of Georgia, the University of Iceland, and most recently at Brown University, where he was was the inaugural José Amor y Vásquez visiting scholar.

Tom is Reviews Editor of Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, co-editor of the Screen Arts issue for Hispanic Research JournalLink opens in a new window, and sits on the editorial board for the series Moving ImageLink opens in a new window for Legenda. Tom is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research interests

Tom has published widely on Spanish film, with much of his recent research focussing on sound in Spanish film and culture. He also has an interest in landscape, architecture, movement and cinematic geographies in Spanish and Latin American cinema. Tom welcomes prospective PhD students in any of these areas.

Current projects

Tom's latest monograph The Spanish Quinqui Film: Delinquency, Sound, Sensation is the first English-language study of cine quinqui, a series of popular Spanish films made in the late 1970s and early 1980s which starred real-life juvenile delinquents. Through drawing on a diverse range of materials which range from media texts to crime reports, from radio cassettes to criminological and sociological studies on delinquency, the book provides a social history of marginal communities whose voices have most often been unheard in critical studies of Spain's transition to democracy.

He has recently co-edited two special journal issues: 'Spanish Sound Studies' for Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies with Samuel Llano, and 'Contemporary Spanish Screen Media and Responses to Crisis and Aftermath' with Chris Perriam for Hispanic Research Journal.

Administrative roles

  • Director of Research (Hispanic Studies)
  • Postgraduate Admissions Contact for Hispanic Studies

Authored and edited books

Edited journal issues

Selected book chapters and articles

  • 'Postmemory, Photography and Touch in Pedro Almodóvar's Madres paralelas', Screen (forthcoming 2023)
  • 'Acoustic Conflict and the Spanish Far Right during the Transition to Democracy' in (eds.) Eduardo Ledesma and L. Elena Delgado, Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Spain (Routledge, forthcoming)
  • 'Elevators and the Poetics of Vertical Mobility in Spanish Film' in (ed.) Susan Larson, Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film (Intellect, 2021)
  • 'Accelerated Rhythms and Sonic Routes: Mapping the sound cultures of bakalao', Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2019, 20 (3)
  • 'Crime, Knowledge and the Photographic Object in La isla mínima', Hispanic Research Journal, 2018, 19 (1)
  • ‘Ghostly Resonance: Sound, memory, and matter in Las olas and Dies d’agost’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2015, 15 (3)
  • ‘Of Machines and Routines: Mundane rhythms and sounds in Whisky and Párpados azules’, Journal of Film and Video, 2015, 67 (2)
  • ‘Out of Place, Out of Synch: Errant movement and rhythm in Buñuel’s Mexican comedies of the 1950s’ in (eds.) Rob Stone and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, The Companion to Luis Buñuel (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)
  • ‘Locating ‘la voz’: The sound and space of Spanish dubbing’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2012, 13 (3), 292-305
  • 'Between the Pretty and the Dirty: Bodies in Utopia in Pretty Dirty Things', Journal of International Cultural Studies, 2011, 14 (2), pp 121-134
  • ‘Producing Resistance: Elías Querejeta’s political landscapes’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 52, Summer 2010
  • ‘No-man’s Land: The transitional time and space of the Spanish delinquent in Carlos Saura’s Deprisa, deprisa’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 85 (5), 2008, pp. 679 – 694

    Qualifications

    • PGCert in Higher Education, University of Liverpool
    • PhD in Film Studies, University of London
    • MA in Spanish Studies, University of London
    • BA (Hons) in Hispanic Studies and French, University of London