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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
Film research
Our internationally recognised research explores film and video from a range of perspectives involving aesthetic, conceptual and historical approaches, as well as through film and video practice, while giving emphasis to the close analysis of specific works. Film, which with Drama made a School of Arts submission, is ranked as one of the two best departments in the country in terms of 'research power' in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008: 35% of our research has been recognised as world class (4*) and a further 35% (3*) as internationally excellent. We have also made one of the biggest submissions to the RAE in our subject area nationwide.
As well as being one of the largest centres in Europe dedicated to Film Studies, we have a growing focus on film and video practice in the work of award-winning film-makers, Clio Barnard and Sarah Turner and have introduced a highly innovative PhD by Film as Practice. Research in both theory and practice is currently centred in four broad areas: national cinemas – the form and history: North American, European, Latin American, Asian; the digital in film; the documentary film; and film aesthetics - collaborating with colleagues in the interdisciplinary ‘Aesthetics Research Group’. These groupings are the context of dialogue and collaboration as well as the focus of specific research projects.
The areas of staff research and interests on we which offer post-graduate supervision are:
- the aesthetics of the moving image
- film and philosophy
- film history and film as history
- issues of difference in representation
- narrative theory and practice
- animation and the digital
- documentary
- avant-garde practices
- music and the study of sound
- national cinemas: Hollywood and North American, Latin America, European Cinemas, especially British, French and German, and South East Asian cinema
- authorship
- the still and moving image.
Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the Moving Image
Current staff research and publications.
Programmes for postgraduate taught and research degrees.
Our programme of research seminars for staff and students develops these concerns. Recent speakers at Kent include: David Rodowick, Jonathan Munby, Geoff King, John Gibbs, Laura Mulvey, Helen Hanson, Michael Renov, Christine Geraghty, Stella Bruzzi, Linda Ruth Williams, Mark Betz, Vincenz Hediger, Vanalyne Green, Lee Grieveson, Joan Copjec, Richard Dyer, Sarah Cooper. The Aesthetics Research Group hosted Peter Goldie, Berys Gaut, Dom Lopes, Diarmuid Costello, John Hyman, Rob Hopkins, and Catherine Abell. We hosted Mary Ann Doane as a keynote speaker at the KIASH ‘Cultural Memory: Forgetting to Remember/ Remembering to Forget’, September 2008.
We hold an annual Film Studies Symposium, and recent events include, ‘Wittgenstein, Film and the Humanities’, 2002, ‘Gesture in Film’, 2004, ‘Adaptation’, 2005. 'Television, Genre and Evaluation', 2007 ‘Aesthetics of Photography and Film’.
This year the Aesthetics Research Group are hosting Jerrold Levinson as Visiting Leverhulme Professor in the Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent for 2008-9. Professor Levinson is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, and the author of many significant works in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, including Music, Art, and Metaphysics, Music in the Moment, The Pleasures of Aesthetics, and Contemplating Art.
Werner Herzog’s Cinema: Between the Visionary and the Documentary’ was a major international conference held in 2005, organised by Silke Panse with Film Studies at Kent in collaboration with the Goethe Institute and the Ciné lumière at the French Institute.
The journal Film Studies: An International Review is edited at Kent
We are committed to diverse approaches and practices in thinking and writing about film, television and video, and the research of our postgraduate students is very wide ranging in the questions and issues explored.