Congratulations to Dr Seán Allan (German Studies) for winning a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on his next monograph! Of his project, Dr. Allan said:

The aim of my project is to produce the first full-length study of the East German ‘Künstlerfilm’. Films about art and artists made up a large part of the DEFA studio’s output; yet they have received no substantial scholarly attention to date. What makes these films so important, however, is that they cannot be analysed adequately without calling into question many of the assumptions underpinning existing studies of DEFA. Taking the East German ‘Künstlerfilm’ as a paradigmatic example, my project challenges the way scholars have traditionally conceptualised DEFA as an isolated cultural phenomenon, and seeks instead (a) to integrate East German filmmaking into a broader context of transnational film production, and (b) to emphasise the continuities between DEFA and international trends in cinema both before 1946 and after 1989.