Staff Profiles
| Name and Contact Details | Summary |
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| Dr Sean Holmes Role: Deputy Head of School (Undergraduate) Phone: 01895 266832 Email: sean.holmes@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 131 |
Sean teaches in the Film and Television Studies programme and is presently the Deputy Head of School (Undergraduate). |
| Dr Leon Hunt Role: Senior Lecturer Phone: 01895 266586 Email: leon.hunt@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 101 |
Leon is a Senior Lecturer in Film and TV Studies. His teaching and research interests include Hong Kong cinema, popular East Asian cinema, Cult Film and TV, Horror, TV Comedy and British Film and Television. He has published widely in these areas. British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (Routledge 1998) explores some of the ‘forgotten’ areas of British popular culture (sexploitation films, youth cult novels, ‘low’ comedy), offers an alternative cultural history of the 1970s and engages with issues of taste and popularity. Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger (Wallflower Press 2003) was the first English-language book-length academic study of Chinese martial arts cinema and its impact on global media, including the transnational stardom of Bruce Lee and Jet Li, the migration of Hong Kong film-making talent and aesthetics to Hollywood and the remediation of martial arts cinema through videogames and modern special effects technologies. The book was translated into Chinese and reprinted by Peking University Press in 2011. East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (co-edited with Leung Wing Fai, I.B. Tauris 2008) looks at the global impact of popular East Asian cinemas, and my own essay in the collection examines the way western filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Luc Besson have absorbed influences from Asian action genres. The League of Gentlemen (BFI/Palgrave 2008) is a monograph in the BFI’s ‘TV Classics’ series. My current book Cult British TV Comedy (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2013) expands my research into the cult/post-alternative TV comedy of the last twenty years and includes case studies of Vic Reeves and sitcom writer Graham Linehan as well as exploring ‘dark’ and ‘cringe’ comedy and looking at issues of taste and offence. Leon is also currently co-editing (with Sharon Lockyer and Milly Williamson) Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television (I.B. Tauris forthcoming 2013.)
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| Dr David Ingram Role: Lecturer Phone: 01895 266587 Email: david.ingram@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 143 |
David graduated from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge with a degree in English. He then completed an MA in American Studies at the Institute of United States Studies, University of London, and a PhD in American Literature and Culture at King’s College, London. |
| Professor Geoff King Role: Professor of Film & TV Studies; Director, Screen Media Research Centre Phone: 01895 265826 Email: geoff.king@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 111 |
Geoff King has published books on Hollywood and American independent cinema, film comedy and cultural constructions of reality. His main research interests are focused on the interrelations between industrial, formal and socio-cultural dimensions of recent and contemporary American cinema from the Hollywood blockbuster to the independent sector. The main focus of his current work is the indie sector, starting with American Independent Cinema (2005), a pioneering work in the study of independent film, followed by Indiewood, USA (2009), the first academic analysis of the ‘Indiewood’ zone in which Hollywood and the independent sector overlap. He has also written books on the indie features Donnie Darko (2007) and Lost in Translation (2010). He is currently working on a book-length study of recent lower-budget indie cinema, Indie 2.0: American Independent Cinema Since 2000, due for publication in 2012, including analysis of the role of the internet as a new channel of distribution. His earlier work focused more closely on Hollywood, both generally and particularly in relation to the contemporary blockbuster format, and film comedy. His book Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (2000) remains a key intervention in debates about the relationship between narrative and spectacle in the contemporary blockbuster format. He has also published collaborative books with Tanya Krzywinska on science fiction cinema and videogames (for details of these and other publications, see below). In another life, he worked as a journalist, combining this part-time with undergraduate and postgraduate study before becoming a lecturer at Brunel in 1998. |
| Dr Alisa Lebow Role: Senior Lecturer Phone: 01895 267090 Email: alisa.lebow@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 113 |
Alisa Lebow joined the Brunel School of Arts Screen Media department in April 2007. Prior to coming to Brunel she lived and taught in Bristol, Istanbul, and New York. Her theoretical work focuses on the margins and limits of documentary filmmaking. As both a scholar and a practitioner, Lebow is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, most recently from the British Academy and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is the author of First Person Jewish (Visible Evidence Series, University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and numerous articles on various aspects of documentary. Lebow is the co-organizer of the annual London-based conference, Documentary Now! and has also organized Visible Evidence XVII in Istanbul, as well as a series of symposia on first person documentary from around the world. She is the editor of The Cinema of Me (Forthcoming, Wallflower Press). She is also the co-editor of another volume, The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, with Professor Alexandra Juhasz (Forthcoming, Blackwell Publications). She is a founding member of docIstanbul, an organization dedicated to advancing the cultural awareness and theoretical debates around documentary in Turkey and writes a monthly column on documentary for the Turkish film magazine, Altyazi. Lebow was a Visiting Fellow at the NYU Center for Media and Religion in Autumn 2005. Her documentaries have been aired on US television and have been screened in festivals and museums worldwide. |
| Dr Xavier Mendik Role: Lecturer in Film and TV Studies/Director of the Cine-Excess Film Festival and DVD Label Phone: 01895 66789 Email: xavier.mendik@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 106 |
Xavier is a lecturer in Film and Television Studies, as well as the Director of Brunel’s Cine-Excess international Cult Film Festival and DVD label www.cine-excess.co.uk. He is also Director of the acclaimed Cult Film Archive, which houses over 4,000 films and research resources in the Brunel library. He has written extensively on cult and horror traditions, and some of his publications in this area include The Cult Film Reader (2008), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (2004), Shocking Cinema of the Seventies (2002), Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (2002) and Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (2000). Xavier recently completed 100 Cult Films (with Ernest Mathis), to be released in September 2011 as part of the BFI/Palgrave film guide series, and is currently completing a monograph on 1970s Italian cult film. Beyond his academic writing, Xavier has an established profile as a documentary filmmaker and distributor. he was responsible for the 2011 high-definition UK restoration of Dario Argento’s Suspiria for the Nouveaux Pictures- Cine-Excess DVD label, and has recently directed the documentary ‘The Long Road Back From Hell’, to be included on the Shameless Films 2011 UK Director’s Cut of Cannibal Holocaust. Further details of these activities can be found on www.cine-excess.co.uk |
| Professor Julian Petley Role: Head of Research, Journalism Phone: 01895 265 479 Email: julian.petley@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 046 |
During his career, Julian has moved back and forth between working in the media and teaching about the media, and although he has been a full-time academic for the past twenty years he is still an active freelance journalist, and is a member of the editorial board of the British Journalism Review and of the advisory board of Index on Censorship. He is also chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, in which role he actively campaigns for a media which is both free from restrictions which stop it from performing its proper social functions but, equally importantly, behaves responsibly and displays the same degree of openness and public accountability which it habitually demands from other institutions. This work involves making numerous submissions to official enquiries of one kind or another, giving evidence to parliamentary bodies such as select committees, liaising with like-minded civil society groups, and maintaining a high media profile. All of this activity feeds directly into my teaching and research at Brunel. |
| Mr Julian Savage Role: Lecturer Phone: +44 (0)1895 274000 Email: julian.savage@brunel.ac.uk Office: GB113 |
As an academic, practitioner and critical thinker I am particularly interested in the debates surrounding the theory/practice nexus. I am engaged in fostering discourse amongst practitioners, distributors and exhibitors and the university. Academic attainment
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| Professor Michael Wayne Role: Convenor of Documentary Practice MA Phone: 01895 265830 Email: michael.wayne@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 114 |
Michael has been an academic most of his working life. In part this is because studying film at the North London Polytechnic in the mid-1980s was a revelation to him in so far as it simultaneously provided not just an education in film but a political framework with which to understand the world around him. That connection between the study of a medium as a medium through which to learn about the world, remains central to his work as a teacher and researcher. |
| Dr Milly Williamson Role: Subject Leader Screen Media Phone: 01895 274000 Email: milly.williamson@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 101 |
Milly Williamson is Senior Lecturer in Film and TV Studies. She teaches and researches in the areas of horror, celebrity culture, gender, racism and the media, television studies and fan culture. Milly has a BA from the University of the West of England and a PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of a book on the vampire cinema, has published widely on horror and is editing a collection on images of the undead with Leon Hunt. The main focus of her current work is the study of stardom and celebrity and she is at present completing a book on this topic. She has also been conducting research into the media representation of Islam and British Muslims and has published a number of articles on this topic. |
| Malcolm Zammit Role: Senior Technician Phone: +44(0)1895 267935 Email: malcolm.zammit@brunel.ac.uk Office: Antonin Artaud Building 013 |
Malcolm provides tech support to the Screen Media subject area. He also designs and delivers various technical workshops for undergraduate and postgraduate students of the School of Arts.
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