bios
Nathan Abrams (Co-organiser) is a Professor in Film at Bangor University and well as the lead director for the Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studies and co-convener of the British Jewish Contemporary Cultures network. He lectures, writes and broadcasts widely (in English and Welsh) on British and American popular culture, history film and intellectual culture. He co-founded Jewish Film and New Media: An International Journal and his most recent books are Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (with Robert Kolker, Oxford University Press, 2019), Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (IB Tauris; Rutgers University Press, 2012). His most recent work focuses on legendary film director Stanley Kubrick but he is also interested in issues of sustainability and the environment, exploring single-use plastic pollution and its solution.
Aman Agah is a first year PhD student in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. aman has a background in film and media studies and regularly dreams of electric sheep.
Tom Allbeson is a Senior Lecturer in Media History at Cardiff University and co-editor of the Journal of War & Culture Studies. His research concerns media history and visual culture in contemporary Europe with specialisms in photojournalism and conflict, collective memory in post-conflict societies, and urban history. His first book – Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City – was published by Routledge in 2020. He has also published in Journal of Modern History and Modern Intellectual History. He is co-investigator on a project with the University of Edinburgh addressing photography in historic and present-day peacebuilding initiatives. He is also co-authoring a book about histories of photojournalism and conflict with Stuart Allan.
Bernd Behr is a Taiwanese-German artist based in London where he is Senior Lecturer in Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London and a PhD candidate in the School of Arts and Humanities, Royal College of Art. His research practice investigates nonlinear genealogies and speculative trajectories at the intersection of optical regimes and the built environment. He is Associate Editor at Philosophy of Photography and has presented papers at conferences including Transactions: Image/Art/Science, University of Westminster, London, 2019, and Digital Cultures, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany, 2018. His work has been exhibited internationally, including Chisenhale Gallery, Bloomberg Space, and ICA, London, High Desert Test Sites, California, Kadist Foundation, San Francisco, and Para Site, Hong Kong. Behr co-represented Taiwan at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013.
Rebekah Brammer teaches English as a Second Language in Brisbane, Australia and has studied drama, film and television, and applied linguistics. She has also lived in the UK and worked for BBC Worldwide. She has been contributing to the Australian film, television and media journals Metro and Screen Education since 2008. She is a freelance writer, and has no current academic affiliation. Her Master of Arts was awarded by University of New England, Australia.
Jordan Byrne is a Graduate from the Architecture Department at The University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and current Architectural Designer. Alongside building design and engineering, Byrne has experience within film set-design. With a love of science-fiction literature and film from a young age, Jordan Byrne wrote two dissertations on the impact of Architectural Environment on character persona within a narrative, achieving his Master’s Degree in 2018. Byrne aims to continue this line of research through a PHD in the near future.
Louis D’Arcy-Reed is a social, political, and cultural theorist specializing in the intersection of spatial sociological, architectural, and psychoanalytic inquiry. Utilizing facets of contemporary culture, media, and filmic representations, D’Arcy-Reed presents interrogations on social and political control, and the role of the built environment in the creation of cognitive and embodied urban fabrics. He is a regular contributor to the arts website Corridor8, and has written for Aesthetica Magazine, whilst also having a career as an artist and curator. He is currently a lecturer in liberal arts and sociology at York St John University.
Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and Film at the University of North Florida (USA). He is the author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (2012), Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary (2017), and Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang (2022), all from the University of Minnesota Press.
Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student in English Literature at Université Laval in Québec. Her master’s thesis focused on gender, technology, and cyborg theory in Frank Herbert’s Dune. Her dissertation work seeks precedent for contemporary American astroculture, as expressed through science fiction and the public imaginary, in ancient travel stories, including Homer’s Odyssey. In addition to sci-fi, research interests include technology and culture, horror, and postmodern theory.
Hunter Gardner is a Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, and a classicist working in the field of classical film and television reception studies, with a particular interest in science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. She regularly teaches and publishes on the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in cinema and popular culture. She has worked on a number of projects with co-presenter Amanda Potter, most recently co-editing a collection on Ancient Epic in Film and Television (EUP 2021). She has also co-edited a collection of essays on adaptations of the Odysseus myth in various media (novels, visual arts, television), Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures: The Journey Home (2014; paperback 2016).
Sam R.M. Geden is a filmmaker, writer and academic who graduated with an MA in Film Studies from the University of Essex whose main research interest is in posthumous media. His poetry and prose have been published by Muscaliet Press, while his MA dissertation film “The Land That Our Grandchildren Knew” was nominated for the COVID Student Production Award at the inaugural Critical Awards in Television. His first academic article - titled "Repeat Performance: Embodying the Artist's Legacy in Audience Engagement with Posthumous Live Performance" - will soon be published by the Journal of the New Techno Humanities.
Christophe Gelly is Professor of English in the Department of Clermont Auvergne University. Specializing in 19th and 20th century British literature and film studies, he focuses his research on the following areas: paraliterature, British and American crime fiction, film adaptation, film theory and theory of intermediality. He has published, edited or co-edited several books including: Christophe Gelly et Anne Rouhette, Sense and Sensibility [Jane Austen, Ang Lee], Neuilly, Atlande, 2015; Le Réalisme français du XIXe siècle et sa transposition à l’écran, Revue Écrans n° 5, 2016-1, Paris, Classiques Garnier; Christophe Gelly et Gilles Ménégaldo, Lovecraft au prisme de l’image — Littérature, cinéma et arts graphiques, Cadillon, Le Visage Vert, 2017.
David Gill has been a devoted Dick-head for twenty years, curating the blog, The Total Dick-Head (over 1 million views) for more than a decade. He wrote my master's thesis at San Francisco State University on Dick -- specifically his novel, "Time Out of Joint” -- and for the last sixteen years he has been teaching English, regularly assigning "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" In 2012, he organized The Philip K Dick-Fest at SFSU, an international conference and fan get together which featured 130 guests from all over the world. He worked on the footnotes for the publication of Dick’s Exegesis in 2011. He’s been quoted talking about Dick in The New York Times, the LA Times, and Salon.com.
Milan Hain, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor and Area Head of Film Studies at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. He is the author or co-author of five books on cinema, including, most recently, V tradici kvality a prestiže: David O. Selznick a výroba hvězd v Hollywoodu 40. a 50. let (2021) [In the Tradition of Quality and Prestige: David O. Selznick and the Production of Stars in Hollywood of the 1940s and 50s]). His articles have appeared in Jewish Film and New Media (on Hugo Haas and survivor guilt, JFNM 7.1), the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (on David O. Selznick’s adaptation of Anna Karenina, JAFP 13.3) and The Slovak Theatre (on the production of stars in classical Hollywood cinema, ST 69.3). In 2011 and 2012, he was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Recently, he has become the recipient of the Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Łódź, where he researches the representation of Czech and Polish identities in studio-era Hollywood. Since 2013, he has been a programmer at the annual Noir Film Festival, the only event of its kind in Central Europe.
Loraine Haywood is an Honorary Associate Lecturer and Higher Degree Research Candidate in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She explores the resonances of ancient myth, fairy tale, fables, and biblical narratives in film and literary texts to understand human experience and ontology. This is a similar approach to Sigmund Freud in his theories in psychoanalysis to form an analysis and find language, often using ancient mythic texts, with which to understand the unconscious and human trauma. Loraine’s research draws on the theories of Jean Baudrillard, the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and their development in social, cultural, and film theory by Todd McGowan and Slavoj Žižek. She has recently published book chapters and articles on Game of Thrones, Tom Cruise, Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo 2018), and Joker (Phillips 2019).
Georges-Henry Laffont holds a PhD in geography and urban planning. He is director of the "Architectures & Transformations" research laboratory of l’École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Saint-Étienne in France. He questions the role of cinema and photography as methods of Anthropocène's analysis the affective and emotional dimension of the relationship to space, and the performativity and materiality of urban imaginaries in the production of inhabited spaces.
Ben Lamb is the course leader of English and Creative Writing at Teesside University and has published You're Nicked: Investigating British Television Police Series for Manchester University Press.
Ray Lucas is Reader in Architecture at Manchester School of Architecture (MSA), and is currently the Head of Humanities, working across the BA and Masters programmes of one of the largest architecture schools in the UK. He has delivered a broad range of units including Graphic Anthropology, Rewriting the City, and Filmic Architecture. Lucas is author of Research Methods for Architecture (Laurence King, 2016); Drawing Parallels: Knowledge Production in Axonometric, Isometric, and Oblique Drawings (Routledge, 2019); and Anthropology for Architects: Social Relations and the Built Environment (Bloomsbury, 2020). These works establish a continuing research interest in anthropological aspects of architecture. Lucas is also co-editor of the volume Architecture, Festivals and the City (Routledge, 2018).
Jessica Morgan-Davies received her Master's in Literature, Media and Culture from Florida State University in 2021. Her research interests include modernism and modernity in film, the French New Wave, and Deleuzian film theory and philosophy.
Nahida Kibria Choudhury is a PhD candidate at the university of Essex (supervisor Karin Littau). Her work researches the uses of intertextuality within dystopian fiction with a deliberation of memory, narrative, and identity.
Petra Krpan is a teaching assistant at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Textile Technology, Department for Fashion Design and Clothing Design, where she teaches Fashion and New Media, Performance and Fashion, Contemporary Fashion, Sociology of Fashion, Fashion Theory I and II. She completed her education at the Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb, BA Fashion Design and MA Fashion Theory, and at the University of London, London College of Fashion with an emphasis on Fashion Journalism and Fashion Media Business. In 2021 she completed her PhD programme (Phd thesis "Contemporary Fashion as an Event: The New Media and Body Transformations") at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in fashion theory and her academic research interests center upon fashion and visual culture, the influence of media in fashion as well as fashion performance.
Elizabeth Miller (Co-organiser) is a Lecturer in Film, Media and Journalism at Bangor University. She received her PhD in Film Studies from King’s College London. Her research consists of feminist and sociocultural approaches to the representation of women in French cinema from the 1950s to the 1970s. She has published in French Screen Studies and Studies in European Cinema and organized the interdisciplinary conference “Women in the Wake of May 68,” held at King’s College London in 2018.
Frances Pheasant-Kelly is a Reader in Film and Screen at Wolverhampton University, UK. Her research interests centre on abject spaces, fantasy, and the medical humanities. She has written over seventy publications including two monographs, Abject Spaces in American Cinema (2013) and Fantasy Film Post 9/11 (2013) and is the co-editor of Spaces of the Cinematic Home: Behind the Screen Door (2015) and Tim Burton’s Bodies (2021). She is currently working on several monographs including A History of HIV/AIDS in Film, Television and the Media (2022) and The Revenant: Towards a Sensory Cinema (2022).
Dylan Phelan is a Ph.D. researcher at University College Cork, Ireland. Thier research focus on the portrayal of the posthuman subject in contemporary SF. Specifically, their Ph.D. thesis examines the role of capitalist recuperation in the problematic portrayal of the posthuman subject in SF.
Mariana Pintado Zurita is a School of arts funded third-year PhD student in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. She gained her bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and went to complete a Master of Arts degree in Film Studies at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Mariana is supervised by Professor Timothy Barker and Dr Amy Holdsworth. Her PhD research investigates time and temporal emotions in long-term sequels and series. The project focuses on a close textual analysis of sequels such as The Antoine Doinel Series, The Before Trilogy, Trainspotting, and Blade Runner, by gathering different theories of time from scholars such as Deleuze, Christine Geraghty, Rita Felski, Barbara Adam, Sara Sharma, Svetlana Boym and Paul Grainge, among others.
Amanda Potter is a Visiting Fellow at the Open University and a classicist working in the field of classical film and television reception studies, with a particular interest in science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. She has worked on a number of projects with co-presenter Hunter Gardner, most recently co-editing a collection on Ancient Epic in Film and Television (EUP 2021). She has published widely on the ancient world in film, television and fanfiction, and is currently working with Anise Strong on an edited collection on the reception of Xena: Warrior Princess for the Bloomsbury Imagines series.
Ivor Powell (Keynote) is a writer and producer who has worked for nearly three years as an assistant for Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey and line produced for Ridley Scott on The Duellists and Alien as well as many other projects since.
Lawrence Ratna is Hon. Consultant Psychiatrist at St. Ann’s Hospital London and at Freedom From Torture. His affiliations include Professor of Psychiatry at St. George’s University Grenada and Founder member and Secretary of The International Campaign against the Abuse of Psychiatry for Political Purposes. A practicing psychiatrist for 52 years, in the last year he has published psychological studies of Vladimir Nabokov - “Reassessing Lolita in the Light of Research into Child Sexual abuse”, Stephen King “-The Divine Madness of Stephen King – A Neurocognitive examination” and Stanley Kubrick -“Kubrick and Madness.” His conference presentations on the issues of Race and Sex in Kubrick’s films are due to be published.
David Charles Reat holds an B(Arch), M(Arch) and ARB FHEA and is the Director of Cultural Studies in the Department of Architecture at University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.
Jennifer Richards is a Tutor (Research) Fashion at the Royal College of Art. Recent research publications include articles on aesthetics, performance and the body within film and visual culture. Her most recent work explores the ‘Influence of the (Gothic) Genre in High Fashion’, in Clive Bloom (ed), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. This chapter explores the re-emergence of Gothic modes within contemporary Fashion from street style to haute couture.
Karen A. Ritzenhoff is a Professor in the Department of Communication at central Connecticut State University where she is also affiliated with Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as Cinema Studies. She teaches film studies as adjunct at the University of Hartford. Her main scholarly interest is geared towards war films as well as “women and film,” a class she teaches every year. More recently, she has been involved in Kubrick Studies and explores questions of gender, race and gender.
Christopher L. Robinson (Co-organiser) is Assistant Professor of English and member of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory (LinX) at the École Polytechnique, IP-Paris, France. He is also on the advisory committee of La Chaire Arts and Sciences. His research interests include the intersections of gender, race, political history and genre, as well as the sciences and the arts. His recent and forthcoming publications include “Dune : Un Mélange Historique, Politique et Romanesque” in Dune: Exploration scientifique et culturelle d’une planète-univers; “Cyborgs, Utopias and Other Science Fictions” in In/Search Re/Search: Imagining Scenarios through Art and Design (2020); “Bernard Rose’s Candyman and the Rhetoric of Racial Fear in the Reagan and Bush Years” in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (2021); “Style et Xénophobie” in H.P. Lovecraft au prisme du XXIe siècle (forthcoming); and “The Progeny of H.R. Giger” in Alien Legacies (forthcoming). He is co-editor of The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction, Ethics (2021); 2001: l’Odyssée de l’Espace, au carrefour des arts et des sciences (2021) ; and Blade Runner : Analyse pluridisciplinaire d’une œuvre culte (forthcoming). He recently launched and co-organized a weekend of conferences, artistic, musical and theatrical events to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Blade Runner for the Némo International Biennial of Digital Arts (Paris, 2021).
Issac (Itsik) Rosen is a researcher, film scholar and writer/director who is currently a PhD student at Tel Aviv University, where he received his MA in 2011. He teaches Film & Television theory in Haifa University and Sapir College. His research interests include Israeli cinema, dystopian films, sci-fi, urbanism and intertextuality in films. Recent publications include “Deconstructing Ari: Historiography, Memory, and Trauma in Ari Folman’s Dystopian Trilogy” and “Nostalgia Isn’t Aimed at What it Used to: the Practice of Nostalgia and Retro Aesthetic in the Alternative History Television Series the Man in the High Castle,” with recent filmmaking including ForgotteNation, Mona Nights and “Upgrade Yourself.”
Lars Schmeink is Leverhulme Visiting Professor of German Studies at the University of Leeds, UK and Research Fellow at the Europa-Universität Flensburg. He has inaugurated the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (GFF) in 2010 and served as its president until 2019. He is the author of Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society, and Science Fiction (Liverpool UP 2016), and coedited several volumes on SF: Cyberpunk and Visual Culture (Routledge 2018), The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (Routledge 2020), Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (Routledge 2022), and New Perspectives in Contemporary German Science Fiction (Palgrave 2022).
Tonguc Sezen is a lecturer in Transmedia Production at Teesside University. He holds a PhD in communications and a habilitation degree in visual communication design. Before joining Teesside University, he has been a postdoctoral research fellow at Istanbul University, a Fulbright Researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology, a research fellow at Rhein Waal University of Applied Sciences, and an associate professor at Istanbul Bilgi University. His research interests include transmedia worldbuilding, narrative design, and LEGO studies.
Timothy Shanahan is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of Philosophy and Blade Runner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), co-editor (with Paul Smart) of Blade Runner 2049: A Philosophical Exploration (Routledge, 2019), and author of half a dozen essays on Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049. He lives in Los Angeles.
Piotr Sitarski teaches film and media at the University of Łódź, Poland. His interests include history of film viewing practices and history of new media. He recently published, with Maria B. Garda and Krzysztof Jajko, New Media Behind the Iron Curtain (Jagiellonian University Press 2021).
Paul Smart is a Senior Research Fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. His research interests lie at the interface of the network, Web and cognitive sciences. He is particularly interested in the cognitive and epistemic significance of emerging digital technologies, especially the role of the Web in shaping individual and collective forms of cognition. Paul is a professional member of the Association of Computing Machinery, a member of the Cognitive Science Society, and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. His books include Minds Online: The Interface between Web Science, Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind (Now Publishers) and Blade Runner 2049: A Philosophical Exploration (Routledge).
Simon Spiegel is a lecturer and Privatdozent at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich and at the University of Bayreuth. He has published widely on science fiction film, utopias and related subjects and is chief editor of the interdisciplinary Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung. From 2014 to 2018 he was a collaborator in the research project «Alternative Worlds. The Political-activist Documentary Film» funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation which resulted in his professorial thesis on utopias in nonfiction films (published in 2019 with Schüren as Bilder einer besseren Welt, published in English as Utopias in Nonfiction Film with Palgrave Macmillan in 2022). He was co-organizer of #spoiltheconference, the first international conference on spoilers.
Joe Street is Associate Professor in American History at Northumbria University. A specialist on the history and culture of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s, his publications include Dirty Harry's America and 'Do Bounty Hunters Dream of Black Sheep'
Alexander R. E. Taylor is a Lecturer in Communications at the University of Exeter. His research explores images and imaginaries of digital collapse. He is especially interested in the material infrastructure and labour that underpin digital services and the failure and breakdown of internet infrastructure. He is an Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Extreme Anthropology and a founder of the Cambridge Infrastructure Resilience Group, a network of researchers exploring critical infrastructure protection in relation to global catastrophic risks.
Neval Turhalli is a research assistant at Istanbul Bilgi University, Department of Media. She graduated from the departments of Psychology and Film & TV. Later, she continued her MA degree in New Media Program. Currently, she attends the PhD program in Media and Communication Studies at Galatasaray University, Istanbul. Her main research interests include the convergence of television dramas; independent film and gatekeeping on video-on-demand services in Turkey.
Sherryl Vint (Keynote) is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, and a Professor and the Chair of English, at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is currently an editor for the journal Science Fiction Studies and the book series Science and Popular Culture. She is the author of Bodies of Tomorrow (2007), Animal Alterity (2010), The Wire (2013), Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed (2014); Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge (2020), and Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-Fist Century Speculative Fiction (2021), as well as the co-author of The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (2011). Her co-authored book Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracy will appear in 2022 from Columbia UP. She has edited multiple books, including most recently Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life and the Politics of Reproduction (2022), After the Human: Culture, Theory & Criticism in the 21st Century (2020), and Science Fiction and Culture Theory: A Reader (2015). A recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Innovative Research and its Lifetime Achievement awards, and she is currently working on a research project on speculative finance and speculative fiction.
Jelena Vojković is a PhD student at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia. She works in postgraduate doctoral studies of the literary sciences, theater and dramatology, filmology, musicology and cultural studies, in the department of Theatre studies. She completed her education at the Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb, BA Fashion Design and MA Fashion Theory. Her academic research interests center upon costume and body, more specifically, the relation of the dancer's movemet and the costume in the context of the performance.
Kim Louise Walden is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Cultures in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire. Her current research interests include media archaeology and transmedia film marketing and promotion. She is the author of ‘Nostalgia for the future: How Tron: Legacy’s paratextual campaign rebooted the franchise’ in The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media edited by Sara Pesce and Paolo Noto (Routledge, 2016); ‘Searching for D-9.com in the archives: An archaeology of a film’s website’ Interactions: Studies in Communications and Culture 8 (1) 2017; and ‘Building Better Worlds’: The rise of Alien’s online marketing campaigns’ in Alien Legacies: The Evolution of the Franchise (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is currently writing a book on online film promotion for Amsterdam University Press.
Blake Wilson is associate professor of criminal justice at California State University, Stanislaus. He recently co-edited The Philosophy of Werner Herzog (Lexington Books, 2020). His has contributed chapters to The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy as well as Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy. Among others, he has published articles in the journals The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence, and Polémos.
J. Macgregor Wise is Professor of Communication Studies and Social Technology at Arizona State University. He is author of, among others, Exploring Technology and Social Space (Sage, 1997), where he discussed Blade Runner in terms of Deleuzian territorialization of identity; Culture and Technology: A Primer (with Jennifer Daryl Slack; Peter Lang, 2005 and 2015), and, most recently, Surveillance and Film (Bloomsbury, 2016), winner of the Surveillance Studies Network book prize.