On Friday 26 and Saturday 27 of April the Department of Film and TV's Dr. Vladimir Rosas-Salazar organised a conference called Rethinking Latin America: New Journeys Across Film and Literature at the Faculty of Arts and online. People based in Spain, France, Peru, US, and UK presented and it was funded by an IAS Award. Speakers included Professor Niamh Thornton (University of Liverpool) talking about A Digital Diva: Rethinking María Félix Through her Online Transformations.

Stephen Gundle will deliver the concluding keynote address at the 'Fellini: Italy, the Cinema' international conference on Wednesday 23 June.

Dr Schoonover talks about queers, mud, and Brexit at the Sorbonne

Dr. Helen Wheatley will give a ketnote address entitled 'The desiring girl: exploring the erotics of television' at the ‘Girls on film’: Visualising Femininities in Contemporary Culture conference at Northumbria University on May 23rd.

Here is the abstract for Dr. Wheatley's paper:

This paper will consider the figure of the desiring girl on and in relation to television; in doing so it re-evaluates the applicability of screen theory to television, particularly Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). Drawing on both close analyses of contemporary television drama (for example My Mad Fat Diary (E4, 2013-15), Poldark (BBC1, 2015–), Banana (E4, 2015) and Les Revenants (Canal+, 2012-)) and qualitative audience research into relationship between television and desire, the paper will sketch out the ways in which a variety of contemporary television dramas feature a desiring girl at their heart and through her seek to provide the viewer with intentional erotic spectacle: moments, images, characters, even episodes which both seek to represent and provoke desire. In doing so, this paper will attend to the fact that contemporary television particularly focuses on the presentation of intentional erotic spectacle for a heterosexual, female audience.

On the other hand, however, I will argue television is also characterised by accidental erotic spectacle and that scopophilia can also be located in ‘unlikely’ places on television; the scopophilic visual pleasures of the medium, particularly for the desiring girl, cannot be easily contained in or confined to particular programmes, genres or slots in the schedule. I will draw on Barthes’ notion of erotic intermittence (1975) to argue that the appearance and disappearance of erotic spectacle is fundamental to the structures of television narrative and television scheduling. Barthes’ exploration of the play between presence and absence in the erotic, and the making of what is ‘private’, ‘public’, expresses something of what is specific to a televisual presentation of erotic spectacle that centres on the girl as protagonist and potential viewer.

Find out more about the conference HERE

At the conference 'ESTETICA, IDENTITÀ E INDUSTRIA CULTURALE DEL CINEMA LOCALE
Sardegna e periferie europee dagli anni Novanta a oggi', the department's Karl Schoonover will deliver a talk entitled, "Sardinia, cinematic space, and departicularised place" on 14 December. For more information, go here.