Film and TV Group Members
Film and TV Studies staff and areas of current research specialism:
British film and television industries, including collaboration with the BECTU History Project on a number of oral history initiatives, including work on film laboratory workers whose skills have been rendered largely obsolete by digital technologies.
Postwar Italian cinema, cult film, film and comics, the horror film. Recent publications include Danger: Diabolik (Wallflower Press, 2018)) and Cult British TV Comedy: from Reeves and Mortimer to Psychoville (Manchester UP, 2013) and The League of Gentlemen (BFI TV Classics, 2008).
American independent cinema, art cinema, quality Hollywood, constructions of cultural value. Earlier work on Hollywood cinema, spectacle and narrative in cinema, film comedy, videogames. Recent publications include Positioning Art Cinema: Film and Cultural Value (2019) and Quality Hollywood: Markers of Distinction in Contemporary Studio Film (2016). Website: http://www.gkindiefilm.com
Screen representation and animation. Recent focus particularly on craft-based, handmade animation and constructions of cultural value. Combines textual analysis, industry and production studies, and feminist approaches. Includes classic 'animation studies' which takes into account the ontology of animation, metamorphosis and the illusion of life. Recent publications include The Animations Studies Reader (co-editor, Bloomsbury 2018) and The Crafty Animator: Handmade, Craft-based Animation and Cultural Value (co-editor, Palgrave 2019).
Film theory and documentary practice. World cinema, film philosophy. Recent publications include Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness: Philosophy and Powers of Existence (Bloomsbury 2014) and, with Nikolaj Lubecker, eds, James Benning’s Environments: Politics, Ecology, Duration (Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Films include About a War (2018), co-director with Abi Weaver.
Convenor of the MA in Media and Public Relations, interested in political communications, colonial and imperialist framings of the west and 'the rest', documentary film, the politics of popular culture, national identities and Marxist cultural theory and philosophy. Most recent book Marxism Goes To The Movies (Routledge 2020). Prof Wayne also makes documentary films. He is the co-director of The Acting Class (2017) which won Best National Feature Documentary at the Labour Film festival 2017.
Practitioner-academic. Interdisciplinary research interests include: Local media and communities; Geographies of radio broadcasting; Media production and journalistic practice; Promotional cultures and public relations; Storytelling and the dramatized documentary form; Content analysis of aural texts; Practice-based research and teaching; Qualitative research methods and the reflexive mindset. Recent outputs include a report on community radio during lockdown: https://www.brunel.ac.uk/research/Projects/UK-community-radio-responses-to-COVID-19