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Film and Television Studies

Co-Tutelle PhD Programme in Global Screen Studies

A collaborative PhD programme between the University of Warwick, UK & Nagoya University, Japan

The Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick and The Graduate School of Humanities at Nagoya University offer an innovative and collaborative PhD programme that consolidates an existing research partnership and introduces a range of exciting research opportunities for internationally minded graduate students wishing to work on projects related to the study of world screen cultures.

Students can enrol on a 3-4 year doctoral studies programme at either Warwick or Nagoya and enjoy joint supervision across the duration of their studies with a dedicated year of study and research at the respective partner institution. Students are expected to graduate with one degree from the main university with a certificate from the partner university attached.

Students can thus benefit from the dynamic interaction of the existing research and pedagogical strengths in the two institutions with the added advantage of enjoying a programme of study in both Europe and East Asia.

University of Warwick Nagoya University


Key facts

Qualification: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Duration: 3-4 years full-time, 5-7 years part-time

Number of places: Up to 2 a year

Contact: PG Admissions Secretary

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The Co-Tutelle Programme is designed with a range of additional benefits in terms of active participation in the wider graduate research cultures of the two universities. These include the opportunity to take part in related MA modules/classes provided by both departments and involvement in the various research talks, conferences and symposia organised throughout the year at Warwick and Nagoya.

It is thus designed to deliver the following objectives:

  • A high-quality graduate experience with an international focus
  • The possibility of studying in at least two different regional contexts and film cultures
  • The chance to carry out a tailored research project that strengthens an intensive understanding of the global nature of screen culture
  • The opportunity to collaborate with a range of international film and television scholars with different methodological perspectives
  • The chance to develop language skills related to more than one regional context
  • The enhancement of future employability skills related to academia and related professions worldwide

The Co-Tutelle PhD Programme in Global Screen Studies is mainly conducted between the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick and at the Cinema Studies Unit at the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. The programme is also supported by the two Global 30 programs in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University: The Japan-in-Asia Cultural Studies Program and The Linguistics and Cultural Studies Program.

The Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick is one of the leading Film Studies departments in Europe and has a longstanding reputation for the quality of its research and teaching into film and television aesthetics, history and theory. A number of recent staff appointments have consolidated its profile in world cinema studies thus offering a range of innovative methodological opportunities for graduate students. The Department benefits from outstanding technical and academic resources and the University of Warwick houses the finest university collection of film and television studies related material in the country. It is located just over an hour away from central London and Oxford by train thus providing easy access to both cities’ world-renowned research libraries.

The Cinema Studies Unit at Nagoya University is one of the East Asia region’s pioneers in the study of national and transnational Asian film cultures with a special focus on historically informed cultural studies. It has a diverse international student population and offers expertise in the history and historiography of East Asian cinemas and visual culture (Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean) as well as East Asian historical and literary studies.

Global 30: The Japan-in-Asia Cultural Studies Program at Nagoya University offers courses on Japanese and East Asian modern literature, East Asian film studies and Japanese and East Asian modern history. Global 30: Linguistics and Cultural Studies Program at Nagoya University offers courses MA students a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary introduction to various aspects of language and culture in a global context.

There is no formalised programme of study with a research-based PhD. You and your supervisor will develop an independent timetable of research across your three years. In addition to individual supervisions, you will have access to:

  • Study Skills Training
  • University and Faculty training (e.g. computer, language skills).
  • University and departmental resources.
  • Auditing of one or more MA courses.
  • Teaching opportunities, where feasible.
  • The Department's Research Seminar series.
  • The Department's Postgraduate Methods Reading Group
  • The Postgraduate Research Group, a venue for sharing and discussing research and ideas in a friendly, informal atmosphere with other postgraduates.

Supervision

Supervisory arrangements are on a 50/50 shared basis throughout the duration of the degree programme. There is some flexibility about how this is managed, according to the location of the student, but there are always shared oversight of all written work produced.

Progression

Progression throughout the degree are monitored via an annual review panel and an annual reporting system involving students, supervisors and other members of staff at each institution. There is one set of agreed processes shared between both institutions.

Residency

There is a minimum of period of one year’s residency at the partner institution (usually in the second full-time year of registration) with some additional level of flexibility to bring this total to a full 50/50 arrangement if required. Students are eligible to apply for accommodation at the partner institution.

Teaching Staff and Areas of Expertise
Staff Member Research Specialism
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK
Michele Aaron

Aaron’s work centres on the question of the potential of film to affect and even effect personal, social and political change. She has published on the power and ethics of representation and spectatorship in relation to, principally, mainstream English language cinema. Recently, her work has turned both outwards and towards film practice and she is increasingly engaged in community-based collaborations with artists, filmmakers and community groups. Aaron is the director/curator of the Screening Rights Film Festival.
José Arroyo

Arroyo is Principal Teaching Fellow in the Department of Film and Television Studies at Warwick and an active online film critic and blogger. He has published widely in numerous media outlets and has particular interests in film aesthetics, film criticism, queer cinema and Spanish cinema.
Jon Burrows

Burrows’ research is focused on the subject of silent cinema, with a particular emphasis on early British cinema. He has written numerous essays and articles about different aspects of British silent film culture and monographs about the employment of famous theatre stars in British cinema of the 1910s, and the investment boom, which created the British cinema industry in the period between 1909 and 1914.
Catherine Constable

Constable’s main research interests include continental philosophy, postmodernism, feminist theory and Hollywood cinema. She has published widely on science-fiction cinema. She is the author of Postmodernism and Film: Rethinking Hollywood’s Aesthetics (2015), which explores the links between postmodern theory and postclassical Hollywood cinema.
Tiago de Luca

De Luca’s research interests include cinematic realism; time and duration in the cinema and contemporary world cinema, with an emphasis on Brazilian and Latin American cinema. He is the author of Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (2014), which looks at current forms of realism in world cinema and is the co-editor of Slow Cinema (2016) which focuses on slowness both as a trend in contemporary global cinema and in terms of its previous manifestations in film history. His current research explores the ways in which the Earth has been imaged and imagined in the cinema and related media.
Stephen Gundle

Gundle’s principal research interests lie in the fields of film and cultural and political history with a special emphasis on Italian cinema and other media. He has written about the Italian star system and relations between the media, politics and consumption from Fascism to the present as well as authoring two books about the history of glamour in Europe and the United States.
Julie Lobalzo Wright

Lobalzo Wright’s main research interests are film stardom, popular music and cinema, musicals, masculinity in film, and animation. She is the author of Crossover Stardom: Popular Male Music Stars in American Cinema (2017).
James MacDowell

MacDowell’s research is primarily concerned with exploring the aesthetic and cultural significance of popular filmmaking, with a particular focus on the generic conventions, narrative strategies, and style of American cinema, old and new (including Hollywood cinema, American ‘indie’ cinema, and cult film). His work is influenced by philosophical aesthetics, and by critical traditions dedicated to exploring the interdependence of style and meaning.
Rachel Moseley

Moseley has published widely on British and US television and film, with particular reference to television history and criticism, region, gender and representation and teen film and television. Her books include Growing Up with Audrey Hepburn: Text, Audience, Resonance (2002) and Picturing Cornwall: Landscape, Region and the Moving Image (2018)
Alastair Phillips

Phillips’ research interests lie in international film history, culture and aesthetics with special emphasis on French and Japanese filmmaking; histories of exile and emigration within Europe and between Europe and Hollywood and the representation of place and landscape in historical and contemporary world cinemas. He is the co-editor of The Japanese Cinema Book (with Hideaki Fujiki) (2020) and an editor of Screen.
Michael Pigott

Pigott’s research interests cover experimental film and video, moving image projection outside of the cinema (in galleries, nightclubs and other spaces), projection mapping, filmmaking and the city, cinema and architecture, the temporality of moving image works and the ontology and aesthetics of digital video. He has active teaching and research interests in contemporary and historical world cinemas.
Karl Schoonover

Schoonover’s research primarily explores the relationship of cinema aesthetics to questions of political change. His work has interrogated the notion of ‘world cinema’ from a range of critical, institutional and theoretical perspectives. He is the co-author or co-editor of two major books in the field of world cinema studies: Global Art Cinema (2010) and Queer Cinema in the World (2016). His current research looks at how cinema as a medium is defined by its relationship to waste and how films turn to trash as a means of refashioning the broader politics of cultural production and value.
Richard Wallace

Wallace’s research interests include aspects of film and television documentary, British film and television history, and screen comedy. He is the author of Mockumentary Comedy: Performing Authenticity (2018).
Helen Wheatley

Wheatley’s research interests include various aspects of British television history and she has published work on popular genres in television drama in the UK and US, including the monograph Gothic Television (2006). She has an ongoing interest in issues of television history and historiography and is the author of Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (2016).

NAGOYA UNIVERSITY

Hideaki Fujiki

Fujiki’s research mainly explores the industrial and socio-cultural history of Japanese cinema and the local reception of American and European films in relation to Japanese modernity; the history of film audiences and film stardom in Japan; film and media culture in relation to nationalism and imperialism; transmediality; citizenship and ecological issues in contemporary Japanese and other fiction and non-fiction cinema, especially the depiction of radiation, animals, waste, the Anthropocene and the public sphere.

Ran Ma

Ma’s research interests mainly concern film festival studies and transnational cinema, with an emphasis on the history and theory of film festivals and the independent filmmaking across the Sinophone communities (including China), Japan and other East and Southeast Asian countries. She has strong teaching and research interests in Asian cinema and visual culture.

Chikako Nagayama

Nagayama's research and teaching interests include gender, the family and sexuality in society and popular culture; transnational entertainment forms, and postcolonial and critical race research in the Asia-Pacific context. Her work has been published in journals such as Signs and Transnational Cinemas. With Jooyeon Rhee and Eric Li, she is currently working on a co-edited volume, Gender and Food in Contemporary East Asia (Lexington, forthcoming).

Shota Ogawa

Ogawa’s research and teaching interests include diasporic cinema, travelogues, non-theatrical screen cultures, and archive theory with an emphasis on (post)imperial Japan. His projects include a monograph on travelogue films in imperial Japan and a co-edited anthology (with Joanne Bernardi), The Handbook of Japanese Cinema (2020). His writings have appeared in journals such as Screen, Media Field and the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.
Facilities

Warwick's facilities are unrivalled in the field. There has been a huge proliferation of film and television studies degrees in the UK over the past decade. However, few of these degrees are properly resourced. Teaching film and television properly is expensive and requires considerable investment in specialist equipment and services.

The Department of Film and Television Studies possesses its own fully dedicated teaching rooms, all equipped with 16mm and 35mm projectors and multi-system VCR and DVD projectors.

While video and DVD are used for the purposes of seminar discussion, Warwick is one of the few institutions that goes to the trouble and expense of teaching film as film, as opposed to the prevailing practice of using video/DVD as substitutes.

Every week prints are hired and projected for all courses. There are student rooms in the department with dedicated video capture computer equipment, and a special study room for graduate students.

The library is probably the strongest of any University in the UK for Film and Television Studies. Along with an outstanding collection of books and journals, it also has the biggest video and DVD collection of any university in the country, consisting of over 20,000 titles (on average, 20 titles are added weekly to the collection in response to staff research interests and to requests from students in relation to their dissertation needs). See the full list of the department's resources.

Research Culture

Warwick

We run various programmes to help facilitate a stronger research culture:

  • We run research seminars led by departmental staff, PhD students and a range of distinguished visiting speakers (see the current seminar programme) and a Methods Reading Group for research students.
  • Our postgraduate community run their own Postgraduate Research Group, a venue for sharing and discussing research and ideas in a friendly, informal atmosphere.
  • We run and hosts the Midlands Television Research Group. This meets regularly each term and is composed of staff and graduate students from the University of Warwick and a number of other leading institutions in the field. It organises a programme of seminars, work-in-progress presentations, guest speakers, and supports collaborative research projects. All graduate students with an interest in Television Studies can become members.

We also organise and hosts major international film and television studies conferences. You can read about some examples here:

Uniquely, the University of Warwick’s Humanities Research Centre offers funding opportunities for graduate students to organise one-day conferences focusing on their own research areas, allowing them to communicate ideas with leading international figures in their field. Several of our research students have benefited from this scheme.

Nagoya

  • We are closely affiliated with the Center for Transregional Culture and Society and host an annual international symposium with various interdisciplinary topics such as ecology, gender and media. We also hold regular seminars and publish the journal JunCture.
  • We provide a strong bilingual culture of Japanese and English. Some classes are conducted in English, some in Japanese, and some both in English and Japanese. Our international symposia are usually held with simultaneous translation between Japanese and English.
  • Nagoya is the fourth largest city in Japan. Renowned cultural events such as the Aichi Triennale Aichi International Women’s Film Festival and World Cosplay Summit are regularly held. Numerous cultural facilities including the Aichi Arts Center, Nagoya City Art Museum, the Studio Ghibli Park, Nagoya City Museum and numerous arthouse cinemas (so-called ‘mini-theatres’) are located in the city.
Location

Warwick

Warwick University is 80 minutes away by train from London and 20 minutes from Birmingham. Where research materials might not be available through inter-library loan or held in the video library, the BFI's National Film Library is therefore relatively accessible, as are the great number of institutions, festivals, screenings and events available in the nation's two largest cities.

Nagoya

Located in the middle of Japan, Nagoya has excellent access to research centres and film archives in Tokyo and the Kansai region (including Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe). Nagoya University is 60 minutes away by train from a well-connected international airport. Its central location in Japan places it within easy access of the major university and institutional research collections held in Tokyo and Kyoto.

Many of our past students are now lecturers at numerous Film and Television Studies departments around the country including those at the following universities:

  • Aberdeen
  • Aberystwyth
  • Birmingham
  • Bristol
  • Cheltenham and Gloucester
  • UEA
  • Glasgow
  • Kent
  • King's College, London
  • Leeds Metropolitan
  • London Metropolitan
  • Northumbria
  • Oxford
  • Reading
  • Roehampton
  • Royal Holloway
  • Sheffield Hallam
  • Southampton
  • Southampton Institute
  • King Alfred’s, Winchester

Numerous publications originated as PhD theses supervised in this department, including:

  • Hannah Andrews, Television and British Cinema: Convergence and Divergence Since 1990 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

  • Gregory Frame, The American President in Film and Television: Myth, Politics and Representation (Oxford; New York: Peter Lang, 2014)

  • Amy Holdsworth, Television, Memory, and Nostalgia (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

  • Andrew Klevan, Disclosures of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narratives (Trowbridge: Flicks, 2000)

  • Paul McDonald, The Star System: Hollywood's Production of Popular Identities (London: Wallflower, 2000)
  • Rachel Moseley, Text, Audience, Resonance: Growing Up With Audrey Hepburn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002)
  • Valerie Orpen, Film Editing (London: Wallflower, 2003)
  • Alastair Phillips, City of Darkness, City of Light: Emigre Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
  • Jacinda Read, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
  • Martin Stollery, Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Culture of Imperialism (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000)
  • Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993)
  • Richard Wallace, Mockumentary Comedy: Performing Authenticity (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
  • Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television (London: IB Tauris, 2005)

Below are guidelines mainly for students whose primary entry is the University of Warwick. Guidelines for students whose primary entry is Nagoya University are available here.

Entry requirements

We normally only consider applications from candidates who are in possession of a very good BA Honours degree and who have (or are about to be awarded) a strong Masters degree.

While it is not a formal requirement that candidates have a Masters degree in Film and Television Studies, most successful applicants will usually hold good degrees from relevant fields or adjacent areas of study.

Candidates must have sufficient knowledge of their intended thesis topic to be able to provide a detailed PhD proposal (outlining the key research questions to be addressed and the provisional scope and structure of the project) as part of their application.

All applicants that we have a strong potential interest in will ultimately be interviewed in person, by telephone or by video-call.

English Language Requirements

The IELTS requirements for this programme differ slightly to those for full-time study doctoral study at Warwick. A minimum of IELTS (Academic) score of 6.5 and above in all components will be required for applicants with the expectation that successful applicants move to a higher score after the end of their first year of study.

For more information on Warwick’s normal English language requirements, see: https://warwick.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/apply/english/.

Course Fees and Funding

See postgraduate fees and funding

Funding

Warwick/Nagoya Co-tutelle applicants are unfortunately not eligible for AHRC Midlands4Cities Scholarships.

UK students may apply for a Faculty of Arts CADRE Scholarship as a possible source of funding, although please note that these are not dedicated awards for the Warwick/Nagoya co-tutelle programme. CADRE awards are only offered through a Faculty-wide competition and are not necessarily guaranteed to be offered in any one year. Please contact the PhD Admissions Tutor in the Department of Film and Television Studies for more information.

The main opportunities for International students are the Chancellor's International Scholarship. Students interested in the Warwick/Nagoya Co-tutelle programme are unfortunately not eligible for the China Scholarship Council scholarships.

External funding opportunities for Warwick-based students also include the Daiwa Anglo Japanese Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and the Rotary Yoneyama Foundation.

Both Warwick and Nagoya-based students are eligible to apply to JASSO (Japan Students Services Organization).

Process

In the first instance, please contact either the Director of the Global Screen Studies Programme, Professor Alastair Phillips, or the Director of Postgraduate Admissions, Dr. Tiago de Luca for further advice and to ascertain if your intended project can be supervised in this department.

Deadlines

There are no official deadlines for PhD applications, although there are specific deadlines for anyone thinking of applying for a scholarship. These usually occur in early January. It is highly advised that you submit a draft of your application to the department by early December.

Apply online now