Staff Profiles

Sean teaches in the Film and Television Studies programme and is presently the Deputy Head of the School of Arts. He graduated from Durham University with a degree in Modern History. He went on to complete an MA in American History at Bowling Green State University, Ohio and a PhD in American History at New York University. He has published extensively on the politics of cultural production in the United States, focusing in particular on trade unionism in the early twentieth-century American theatre and the regulation of actors’ labour in silent-era Hollywood. His monograph Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors’ Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America will be published by the University of Illinois Press in early 2013 to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the Actors’ Equity Association, the union that represents American stage actors. He co-edited (with Andrew Dawson of the University of Greenwich) Working in the Global Film and Television Industries: Creativity, Systems, Space, Patronage (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), an interdisciplinary collection of essays on the experience of working in film and television production which Professor Steven J. Ross of the University of Southern California described as ‘the most wide-reaching multinational study of its kind.’

He has recently shifted the focus of his research from the American entertainment industry to the British film and television industries. He is collaborating with Andrew Dawson and the BECTU History Project on a number of oral history initiatives and has just begun a project on working with celluloid which will document the experiences of technicians (cutting-room workers, lab workers, projectionists, etc.) whose working lives, prior to the advent of digital technologies, were defined by handling film.

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.)

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.

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. 

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.

Main areas of interest (film): dissenting voices in world cinema, particularly those originating outside of dominant western hegemonies. Experimental film, the avant-garde, animation and cult film. Teaching practical courses or applied knowledge learning.

Main theoretical interests: semiotics, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, film history.

Academic attainment

• 2001-05: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), School of Creative Arts (New Media), University of Melbourne (current)
  
  
• 1996: Bachelor of Arts (Honours)
  Department of Cinema Studies, La Trobe University
  
  
• 1991-94: Bachelor of Arts, La Trobe University
  
  
• 1993-94: University of California, Santa Cruz as part of the Education Abroad Program (EAP) exchange with La Trobe University

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. 

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 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.