Research degrees with the London School of Film, Media and Design

We are currently seeking applications for PhDs in the following broad fields and areas:

• adaptation studies, film studies, genre studies, genre theory, popular fiction
• creative writing, screenwriting
• filmmaking, film theory, film and philosophy, screen studies
• gender, technology and work
• media arts, art and design history, cultural history, communication design, design and visual literacies
• media history and theory, media archaeology, gallery and museum studies
• media studies, media transformations, branding, public relations, television, news and journalism
• modern literature, literary theory, literature and philosophy
• photography history and theory, media and photography practice, photography and philosophy, literature and photography
• rethinking the image

This PhD project with Professor Jeremy Strong will take as its subject a range of British written and screen texts from the overlapping genres of adventure and the thriller, including novels (and their adaptations) by Haggard, Buchan, Hope, Childers, Charteris, Household, Ambler, Fleming, 'Sapper' and Greene.

Its object is to understand and frame these works in a national/historical context – spanning the late peak of Empire to its fall – and in terms of reading tastes, filmmaking practices and film-going choices. Methodologically, a variety of approaches could be brought to bear, and the eventual choice (or combination) will be in part determined by the skillset of the successful applicant. However, likely avenues include:

• archival study of relevant publishing and production materials
• analysis of contemporary reviews, criticism, and popular responses – including book sales data and box office information
• application of Adaptation Studies’ theoretical approaches to the corpus
• typological analysis of the evolving characteristics of the British hero

Despite a broad turn towards intermediality and attention to questions of ‘convergence’ in cinema, screen and media studies, modern and contemporary art cinemas still largely tend to be considered as more or less autonomous entities, whether as the body of work of a given director or auteur, the product of a nation, movement or tendency (as with, lately, so-called ‘slow cinema’).

If other forms or arts are invoked, these tend to be forms such as literature, or more traditional fine art disciplines such as painting or sculpture. Proposals are invited for research projects (working with Dr Matilde Nardelli and Professor Garin Dowd) seeking to explore modern or contemporary art cinema’s often overlooked status and circulation as itself a mass medium (albeit with a smaller, more selected yield), and/or its relation to, and circulation through, mass media forms such as photography, television, print and online media – which may in fact often even constitute the main forms of a given film’s visibility and cultural circulation.

This is an open call for a number of PhD students interested in examining transformations in media, particularly the relationship between media content and present and ongoing technological innovation and transformation.

This could include:

• public relations management of 'extreme' events across media (Dr Sumaya Alnahed)
• the intersections of geopolitical change with changes in the media landscape (such as the shifting relationship between social media and 'mainstream' media) (Dr Sumaya Alnahed)
• the adaptation and reworking of content and narratives across diverse media platforms (Professor Jeremy Strong, Professor Garin Dowd)
• changing representations and experiences of space and place in the context of globalised media (Professor Garin Dowd)
• the reinvention of cinema in the context of new distribution and production technologies
• transformations in sexual practices and pornography in emergent media contexts (Professor Helen Hester)

This project with Dr Matilde Nardelli will entail research into the role of modern (or post-1945) European cinema in the emergence of so-called modern environmental consciousness and ecological thinking in the second half of the last century, in the wake of rapid industrialisation, consumer booms and processes of de- and recolonisation. In this period cinema has operated as an agent of testimony to the catastrophic ravages of the Second World War and as a mode of interrogating the nuclear threat during the Cold War era. With its capacity to document the material world and its ability to ‘preserve’ that world either in its given status (untarnished or otherwise) or in its progressive degradation (or amelioration), the cinematographic image has functioned, sometimes with and often without the intentionality of the filmmaker(s), as a record of a changing world. Post 1945-cinema, moreover, has operated in parallel with the very globalisation in which it is inescapably implicated, while simultaneously it (globalisation) is also is the primary agential force in environmental disaster and ecological degradation.

The project will develop a critical perspective and propose a new theoretical framework to contribute to this debate. It will combine a broad range of examples or focus on particular directors, or on a national or regionally identified cinema and will propose a framework conducive to its chosen remit.

This is a call for a number of PhD students interested in examining points of intersection between film and screen theory and film and artist film practices.

Projects could focus on the moving image in all or some aspects of film studies, filmmaking, film theory, screen studies and gallery/museum studies (Dr Matilde Nardelli).

Specific focus might be brought to bear on some of the following:

• thought and theorisation as immanent to cinema and/or screen arts (Professor Garin Dowd)
• genealogies of film practice as theory
• intersections of filmmaking and theory in specific directors (Professor Jeremy Strong, Professor Garin Dowd, Dr Matilde Nardelli, Professor Helen Hester)
• film and photographic philosophical approaches to practices of theorisation (Professor Garin Dowd, Dr Junko Theresa Mikuriya)
• institutional critique in gallery-installed moving image art works (Dr Matilde Nardelli)

The combination of theoretical and practical research specialisms in the School means we are able and happy to support either written or practice-based PhD work, which could include film or exhibition practice.

Proposals in other areas of research are welcomed including advertising, graphic communication, public relations and museum studies; media and the Middle East; photography history and theory, new media and new media theory, critical and cultural theory; technologies, sex and gender; media archaeology; adaptation (novel-to-film and other forms of inter-medial and trans-medial traffic); genre studies and genre theory.

This call for MPhil/PhD applications relates to an ongoing research initiative at the University of West London, led by Associate Professor Dennis Olsen, exploring the representation of older adults and ageing in promotional communications. The overarching objective is to facilitate meaningful change within the creative industries regarding age diversity, equity and inclusion, thus shaping future promotional cultures. Research produced as part of this initiative so far has focused on the UK, Germany and Australia.

Applications are invited which offer fresh insight into this socio-politically relevant topic via:

• intercultural/cross-country media investigations in under-researched countries (any rationale in terms of country selection should be informed by, eg, socio-demographic factors and accessibility); 
• collaborative approaches in order to include creators (eg communications agencies, brands, casting agencies) and/or regulators (eg professional bodies) and/or older adults themselves as part of the discourse in the UK.

This is an open call for PhD students interested in working in the broad fields of interest of several researchers in the school (Professor Garin Dowd, Dr Matilde Nardelli, Dr Junko Theresa Mikuriya, Professor Helen Hester).

This call relates to the interrelations between the still and moving image, live and recorded images, sound and the screen, the idea of photography that has shaped its technological development, and how theoretical debates in photography or in relation to images more broadly can be reappraised in the current social, cultural and technological context.

This call also relates to film spectatorship studies in fiction and documentary, accommodating approaches as diverse as cognitive theory, phenomenology and affect theory in the pursuit of exploring the link between film text, audience experience and viewing context.

The combination of theoretical and practical research specialisms in the department means we are able and happy to support either written or practice-based PhD work, including in film, television, photography and media arts.

What are the main currents to have emerged and how do these relate to previous approaches to his work? In the recent responses of several commentators to trends within the humanities centring on such concepts as the anthropocene and the posthuman, is one in the presence of theoretical innovation or the conceptual repackaging of earlier models of thinking about Beckett?

Is the upsurge of work with an archival foundation indicative of an enriching engagement with sources or is it suggestive of a detrimental disengagement from the work itself? Applications are invited which offer fresh insights into some or all of the debates listed above.

The School has supervisory expertise in a range of fields of modern literature. We invite applications focused on the work of individual authors in the modern period but have concentrations of staff research interests in several general areas.

Among these are literary theory and philosophy (Garin Dowd), adaptation (Jeremy Strong), image and text studies (Theresa Mikuriya), literature of the fin-de-siècle (Marcus Nicholls), modernism (Garin Dowd), the nineteenth-century novel (Jeremy Strong), surrealism and writing (Theresa Mikuriya) and literature and class (Jonathon Crewe).

The School also welcomes applications for practice-based and practice-led projects in creative writing and screenwriting (Jeremy Strong, Jonathon Crewe).

Please consult the profiles via the links above and contact one or more of the potential supervisors for an informal discussion if you are interested in making an application.