Richard Wallace is Assiciate Professor in Film and Television Studies. He gained his BA (Hons) in Film and Literature at the University of Warwick, where he also completed his MA (for Research) and PhD in Film and Television Studies. His research interests include aspects of British television history, film and television documentary, and screen comedy.

Current Research:

Richard's work explores the interplay between historical research methods (including archives and interviews), historiography, and the mediation of the ‘real world’ in factual media, thinking about how we tell stories through and about film and television. His most recent research for 'The Projection Project'Link opens in a new window involved conducting oral history interviews and archival research to explore the figure of the cinema projectionist in the UK. The project chronicles the changing role of projectionists and the everyday working practices of a group of skilled workers whose vocation has all but disappeared as a result of the introduction of digital projection systems.

Richard is also a member of the Midlands Television Research Group and convened the group between 2012 and 2014. Between 2013 and 2014 he was the project officer on the ‘Voices of the University: Memories of Warwick, 1965 – 2015’ oral history project running in the Institute of Advances Study at Warwick.

Publications:

Books:

The Pop Music Documentary Since 1980 (Bloomsbury, forthcoming)

Reel Change: A History of British Cinema from the Projection BoxLink opens in a new window (with Jon Burrows) (John Libbey / Indiana University Press, 2022)

Mockumentary Comedy: Performing Authenticity (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2018)

Edited Journals, Journal Articles and Book Chapters:

'"Good Evening, Pasadena!": Fantastical Performance Spaces in the Rock Documentary'Link opens in a new window, in Julie Lobalzo Wright and Martha Shearer (eds.), Musicals at the Margins: Genre, Boundaries, Canons (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 199-213

'Documentary Style as Post-truth Monstrosity in the Mockumentary Horror Film'Link opens in a new window, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 38(6) (2021), pp. 519-540

'A New "Wild West" of Projection' (with Michael Pigott), in Virginia Crisp and Gabriel Menotti (eds), Practices of Projection: Histories and TechnologiesLink opens in a new window (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 19-35

Journal of British Cinema and Television, 15.1Link opens in a new window (2018), ‘The Projection Issue’, co-edited with Charlotte Brunsdon and Jon Burrows

‘Women in the Box: Female Projectionists in Post-war British Cinemas' (with Rebecca Harrison and Charlotte Brunsdon), Journal of British Cinema and Television, 15(1) (2018), pp. 46-65

‘Going Digital: The Experience of the transition to digital projection in the UK’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 15(1) (2018), pp. 6-26

'"We might go into double act mode": 'professional recollectors', rehearsed memory and its uses'Link opens in a new window, Oral History, 45(1) (2017), pp. 55-66

'Voices of the university: anniversary culture and oral histories of Higher Education'Link opens in a new window (with Grace Huxford), Oral History 45(1) (2017), pp. 79-90

‘John Cura: Pioneering of the Television Archive’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 13(1), pp. 99-120

‘Joint Ventures and Loose Cannons: Reconstructing Doctor Who’s Lost Past’ in Paul Booth (ed.), Doctor Who: Fan Phenomena (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), pp. 28-37

‘“But Doctor?” – A Feminist Perspective of Doctor Who’ in Christopher J. Hansen (ed.), Ruminations, Peregrinations, and Regenerations: A Critical Approach to Doctor Who (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 102-116

---