The department holds regular research seminars at which visiting scholars, and departmental members, present their research. All staff, MA and postgraduate students attend these seminars, which are ususally held at 5.15 in room 028 Millburn House in weeks 3, 5 and 8 of each term. Refreshments will normally be available after the seminar. The schedule is given below.

Other research seminars are sometimes held at shorter notice when international visitors make themselves available to discuss their work.

2020-21 Guest Speakers

• 16 June 2021(BAFTSS New Connections Event): Posthumanism(s) Roundtable - ‘Cinematic Sapience and the Rethinking of Rationality in Contemporary Science Fiction’: Liam Rogers (University of Warwick), ‘“I am everywhere”: (Dis)embodied Knowledge and Contradictory Posthumanism in Lucy (2014)’; Dr Laurence Kent (King's College London), ‘Cinematic Sapience and the Rethinking of Rationality in Contemporary Science Fiction’.
• 27 May 2021 (Millburn Seminar): Kim Knowles (Aberystwyth University), ‘Cultures of Resistance: Some Reflections on Contemporary Experimental Film Practice’
• 12 May 2021: Jaakko Seppälä (University of Helsinki): ‘Poetics of Nordic Noir and Affective Mapping: Reimagining the Welfare States’
• 3 March 2021: Kamilla Elliott (Lancaster University): ‘Unfilmable books’
• 10 February 2021: Ipek A. Celik Rappas (Department of Media & Visual Arts, Koç): ‘The Screen’s Extractive Logic: Shooting in Ruined Locations’
• 27 January 2021: Malini Guha (Carleton University): ‘Encounters and Affinities: Exchanges Through the Essay Form’
• 18 November 2020: Lynne Joyrich (Brown University): ‘Reopening the Television Closet/Rethinking the Epistemology of the Console’
• 4 November 2020: Salma Monani (Gettysburg College) 'Indigenous Ecocinema: Reframing the End of the World' (Milburn Research Seminar)
• 21 October 2020: Gary Needham (University of Liverpool), 'Epidemiology of the Closet: HIV as Digital Special Effect'

2019-20 Guest Speakers

• 19 February 2020: Karen Pinkus (Cornell University):'Thinking about Automation: Machines and Labour in Italian Cinema of the 1960s'
• 5 February 2020: Clive Nwonka (LSE): ' The Black Neo-liberal Aesthetic'
• 22 January 2020: Jennifer Coates (University of Sheffield), 'Feelings Without Words: Growing Up in the Cinemas of Postwar Japan, 1945-1968'
• 20 November 2019: Lee Grieveson (UCL), 'On Media, Data, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State'
• 30 October 2019: Aylish Wood, 'Making waves: taking a software approach to Moana'

2018-19 Guest Speakers

• 8 May 2019: Anna Douglas (curator), ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: locating memory and animating engagement through film and exhibition’
• 6 March 2019: Sarah Banet-Weiser (London School of Economics), 'Empowering for whom? Popular feminism and popular misogyny'
• 27 February 2019: Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths, University of London), ‘Against Environmentalism’
• 6 February 2019: Eugenie Brinkema (MIT), ‘Incremental Love'
• 21 November 2018: Helen Hanson (University of Exeter), ‘Looking for Lela Simone: Genres of Industry Discourse and Production Histories of Classical Hollywood'
• 31 October 2018: Professor Ben Highmore, ‘Hardboiled Spies and Soft Cooked Eggs: Tastemakers and Taste Making in Britain in the 1960s and 70s’
• 17 October 2018: Nikolaj Lubecker (St John’s College, Oxford), 'Experimental Film and the Reframing of Social Conflict'

2017-18 Guest Speakers

• 9 May 2018: June Givanni (JGPACA, FRSA), ‘Curating the June Givanni Pan-African Cinema Archive’
• 28 February 2018: Charlie Michael - ‘Popular French Cinema’
• 31 January 2018: Julie Lobalzo Wright (University of Warwick) and Lucy Bolton (Queen Mary, University of London): ‘Star Studies Now: Expanding and Diversifying the Field’
• 22 November 2017: Cecilia Sayad (University of Kent) - 'Documenting Ghosts in the Post-Truth Era'
• 21 November 2017: Jamie Medhurst (Aberystwyth University) - 'Mea Maxima Culpa: John Reith and the Advent of Television' (Centre for Television History, Heritage and Memory Research Seminar)
• 1 November 2017: John Wyver (University of Westminster) - 'Screening the RSC: thoughts on researching the company's 107-year adaptation history' (Millburn Research Seminar)
• 18 October 2017: James MacDowell (University of Warwick) - ‘On the Possibility of Irony in Film’

2016-17 Guest Speakers

2015-16 Guest Speakers

2014-15 Guest Speakers

• 14 October 2014: Prof. Dudley Andrew (Yale) - 'Belief and Technology: Bazin and the Miracle of Superimposition'
• 22 October 2014: Dr. Constanza Burucua (University of Western Ontario) - "Lita Stantic: Auteur Producer / Producer of Auteurs"
• 19 October 2014: Dr. Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan University) - 'Light Festivals: producing defamiliarisation, belonging, interactivity and atmosphere'
• 19 November 2014: Prof. Laura Marcus (Oxford) - ‘Silence, Sound and the City in 1920s Cinema’
• 21 January 2015: Dr Charlotte Crofts (UWE) - 'Remembering Cinema Projection/Projecting Cinema Memories'
• 4 March 2015: Dr Erika Balsom (KCL) - Cheiropoiesis: Film and Obsolescence After Indexicality
• 28 April 2015: Dr. Melanie Williams (UEA) - 'A Lack of continuity: salvaging the gendered work of script supervisors'
• 20 May 2015: Prof. Mary Oliver (Manchester Metropolitan University) (Millburn Research Seminar)
• 3 June 2015: Prof. William Rothman (University of Miami)
• 10 June 2015: Prof. Mark Wolf (Concordia University Wisconsin) - 'Procedurally-generated space in video games'

2013-14 Guest Speakers:

• October 16th: Michael Eaton, 'Charlie Peace – His Amazing Life and Astounding Legend'
• October 30th: Dr. Ranjani Mazumdar (Jawaharlal Nehru University), 'Designing the Past in Contemporary Bombay Cinema'
• November 21st: Paul Mayersberg in conversation with V.F. Perkins
• January 28th: Alina Marazzi, documentary filmmaker, "The I and the Eye"
• February 5th: Professor Carol Mavor (University of Manchester), 'Looking for Ulysse: Agnès Varda’s Ulysse, with postscripts on Les Gens de la terrasse, and Sans toit ni loi.'
• March 5th: Dr. Deborah Shaw (Portsmouth) ‘Transnational Latin American Film and the Languages of Art Cinema’
• May 7th: Professor Hideaki Fujiki (Nagoya University) 'Cinema for "Citizens": Audiences and Activism in Contemporary Japan'
• May 21st: Professor Mike Pearson (University of Aberystwyth) - “Cynefin, chorography and Coriolan/us: performance in and as landscape”

2012-13 Guest Speakers:

• October 17th: phtographer Richard Nicholson with Charlotte Brunsdon, Thom Clipsom and Rick Wallace (University of Warwick - 'The Projection Project'
• October 31st: Vanessa Toulmin (University of Sheffield) 'Taking up the ghost: From the Ghost Show to the Dark Ride'
• November 21st: Alison Butler (University of Reading) Title TBC

2011-12 Guest Speakers:

• October 19th: Christine Geraghty (University of Glasgow) - 'Melodrama, soap opera or classic serial: the case of Bleak House (2005)'
• November 2nd: Cathy Johnson (University of Nottingham) - 'Branding the BBC: promoting the value of public service broadcasting'
• November 23rd: Nigel Thrift (University of Warwick) spoke as part of the Millburn Landscape series
• January 18th: artist David Batchelor on the Chromatic City
• January 25th: Chris Wagstaff (University of Reading)- 'De Sica's Italian Neorealism and Lorenza Mazzetti's British Free Cinema'
• February 8th: Rosalind Galt(University of Sussex) - 'Moulin Rouge! and the Geopolitics of the Decorative'
• February 29th: Richard Hornsey (University of the West of England)- 'Queering the Reconstruction in Ealing's London'
• May 9th: Helen Wheatley (University of Warwick) 'The early history of colour television in Britain'

2010-11 Guest Speakers:

• October 20th: David Martin-Jones (University of St Andrews) ‘Scotland: Global Cinema'
• November 3rd: James Bennett (Royal Holloway, University of London) "Get Internet Famous (even if you're nobody!)": Fame, Television and the Architectures of Participation in Web 2.0'
• November 24th: Catherine Wheatley (University of Southampton) ‘Fairy tale and French cinema’

2008-09 Guest Speakers:

• October 8th: Alex Clayton (University of Bristol) - 'A New Theory of Comic Performance'
• October 29th: Robert Burgoyne (Wayne State University) - 'National Identity, History and Cinema'
• December 3rd: Stephen Gundle (University of Warwick) - 'Glamour/Mussolini'

2007-08 Guest Speakers:

• October 17th: Lee Grieveson (University College London) - 'Cinema Studies and the Conduct of Conduct'
• October 31st: Mette Hjort (Lignan University) - 'The “Advance Party” Initiative: Scottish/Danish Solutions to the Problems of Small Nation Filmmaking'
• November 7th: Michael Raine - 'Teen Musicals as Transcultural Mimesis: Japanese Studio Films of the 1950s' (University of Chicago)
• November 21st: Mandy Merck (Royal Holloway, University of London) - 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'
• December 5th: Lisa Purse (University of Reading) - 'Reading the Digital: mapping the Expansive Terrains of King Kong – the Film and the Body'
• February 27th: Robert Lumley (University College London) 'Working with Found Footage: The Films of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi'
• May 7th: Chris Meir (University of Birmingham) - ‘'Raking Over' Local Hero Again: Markets, Representation and Scottish Film History Reconsidered’
• June 5th: Faye Woods (London Metropolitan University): ‘Music in Teen Television’

2006-07 Guest Speakers:

• October 25th: Vanessa Toulmin (National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield) ‘Representations of Edwardian Leisure in the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection’
• November 15th: Máire Messenger Davies (University of Ulster at Coleraine) ‘Screening childhood: issues in the representation of children on, and in front of, the screen’
• January 17th: Frances Bonner (University of Queensland) - ‘Just Like This: How Televisual Advice is Given in Lifestyle Programmes’
• February 14th: Paul Hibbert (University of Warwick) - 'Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)'
• March 7th: Steve Halfyard (Birmingham Conservatoire, UCE) '“Give me something to sing about": Music and Performance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer'
• June 13th: Melanie Williams (University of Hull) 'Husbands, Housework and Hairdos: Investigating Audience Responses to Woman in a Dressing Gown'

2005-06 Guest Speakers:

• January 18th: Tom Ryall (Sheffield Hallam University) - 'American 'Runaway' Productions in Britain in the 1950s'
• February 21st: Joanne Hollows (Nottingham Trent University) - 'Great Escapes? Home, Mobility and Gender in Television Cookery'
• March 7th: Iris Kleinecke-Bates (University of Hull) - 'Victorian Realities: Representations of the Victorian Age in Current British Television'