Research Interests

My main research interests are early and silent cinema, British cinema, queer and trans film histories, and screen archives and archival research methods. I welcome PhD proposals relating to any of those areas.

My current research focuses on the history of queer and trans labour behind the scenes in British cinema, from the silent era onwards. I am especially interested in using archival evidence, along with ideas and methods from queer studies, production studies and labour history, to explore the contributions and personal experiences of LGBTQ+ movie workers. As part of this project, I am currently researching the film work of the costume and production designer Oliver Messel (funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant).

My first book Acting for the Silent Screen: Film Actors and Aspiration between the Wars (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury)Link opens in a new window, examined the early years of film acting in British cinema, up to the end of the 1920s. I was interested in how the discourse around film acting as a distinct profession and set of skills developed in this period, and how it fed into early notions of screen stardom as a vehicle for social mobility and self-fashioning. The book also looked for ways to recover the experiences of those film fans, especially young, working-class women, who attempted (and often failed) to become film actors themselves.

I have also undertaken research into the early history of film exhibition in the UK, some of which appears on the scholarly website London's Silent CinemasLink opens in a new window, and I am the co-editor, with Pam Hirsch, of the essay collection London on Film (Palgrave)Link opens in a new window.

Publications

Books

• Acting for the Silent Screen: Film Actors and Aspiration between the WarsLink opens in a new window (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017; paperback edition: Bloomsbury, 2021)
• London on FilmLink opens in a new window, co-edited with Pam Hirsch (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Journal Articles

• 'A Life in Pictures: Trans Visibility, Invisible Labour and the Film Career of Robert Allen'Link opens in a new window, Screen, 65:3 (2024), 305-326
• 'Imagining British Film Beauty: Gender and National Identity in 1920s "Star Search" Contests'Link opens in a new window, Early Popular Visual Culture, 19:4 (2022), 342-363. Special double issue on ‘The Gender of Early Cinema’
• 'Exploiting Ambiguity: Murder! and the Meanings of Cross-Dressing in Interwar British Cinema'Link opens in a new window, British Journal of Cinema and Television, 17:3 (2020), 289-312
• '"What a Pretty Man - or Girl!": Male Cross-Dressing Performances in Early British Cinema, 1898-1918'Link opens in a new window, Gender & History, 32:1 (2020), 86-107
• '"Afterwards to See a Cinema Show": The Diary of a London Cinema-goer in 1915'Link opens in a new window, Early Popular Visual Culture, 13:1 (2015), 66-82
• '"On the First Rung of the Ladder of Fame": Would-be Cinema Stars in Silent-era Britain'Link opens in a new window, Film History, 26:3 (2014), 84-105
• 'How to Become a Bioscope Model: Transition, Mediation and the Language of Film Performance'Link opens in a new window, Early Popular Visual Culture, 11:3 (2011), 191-201

Book Chapters

• '"Boyish" Women and Female Soldiers: British Gender Disguise Comedies between the World Wars'Link opens in a new window, in Gábor Gergely and Susan Hayward (eds), The Routledge Companion to European Cinema (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 285-293
• 'Queer London on Film: Victim (1961), The Killing of Sister George (1968) and Nighthawks (1978)'Link opens in a new window, in Pam Hirsch and Chris O’Rourke, (eds), London on Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp.117-131
• 'The Municipal Plunge: Silent Cinema and the Social Life of Swimming Pools’, in Chris Brown and Pam Hirsch (eds), The Cinema of the Swimming Pool (Oxford: Lang, 2014), pp. 21-36
• 'In the Flesh: Personal Appearances and the Picture Personality in Britain', in Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier and Tami Williams (eds), Performing New Media, 1890-1915 (New Barnet: Libbey, 2014), pp. 67-75
• 'Cinema Re-Mystified: A.S. Appelbee's Technological Ghost Story', in Andrew Shail (ed.), Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction, 1896-1912 , co-authored with David Trotter (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011), pp. 46-57

Ph.D. Students

• Peter DomankiewiczLink opens in a new window, 'Thinking Outside the Magic Box: Reconsidering the Work and Inventions of William Friese Greene and their Contribution to Early British Cinema History', co-supervised with De Montfort University (fully funded by the AHRC Midlands 4 Cities doctoral training partnership)

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