Outline

Postgraduate students are supervised via a research team through regular meetings. Research supervision draws on wide staff interests in North American, European, and Latin American cinemas, offering opportunities to study projects based in aesthetic, conceptual and historical perspectives on film and digital media, as well as practice by research. For further details, see staff research interests.

In addition, research students participate in a series of regular events. These include work-inprogress seminars and professional development workshops, both of which are subject specific. Research students are also able to enrol on the Graduate School's Transferable Skills Training Programme. Our research students also actively participate in the Film Research Seminar, which brings leading scholars and practitioners to Kent. We also hold an annual postgraduate presentation day.

Programme structure

For further information see the School site.

Funding

Every school at Kent offers one or two University postgraduate research scholarships, each available for three years, providing fees at the home/EU rate and a stipend up to £13,590 per annum (2011/12 rate).

Many schools offer scholarships in the form of Graduate Teaching Assistantships (GTAs) whereby postgraduate research students receive financial support in return for teaching. The value of awards may vary, but often cover tuition fees at the home/EU rate and a substantial maintenance grant.

All postgraduate research students are eligible to apply for GTAs. See Graduate Teaching Assistantships.

The School of Arts has a number of fees-only scholarships available for its research students.

British candidates can also apply for funding through the department from the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council). The School of Arts also offers a number of graduate teaching assistantships that provide partial fees and maintenance.

For further details of postgraduate funding, see Postgraduate funding.

View further information about scholarships available in the School of Arts

Further information:

• Scholarships website
• Funding website
• Finance Office

Resources and facilities

Film Studies at Kent has excellent viewing and library facilities, with a large number of films screened weekly during term on 35mm, DVD and video. The Templeman Library has extensive book and specialist journal holdings in film and related areas; there is also a large and growing reference collection of film on video and DVD, with individual and group viewing facilities. The department also benefits from the presence of the Gulbenkian Cinema on campus, which runs a programme of new releases and classics.

In 2010, we moved into the purpose-built, and RIBA award-winning, Jarman Building located at the centre of the Canterbury campus. The new building is home to a range of professional standard editing and studio facilities plus a dedicated postgraduate centre and a range of teaching and social spaces.

Further information:

• School website
• Canterbury campus

Staff research

Clio Barnard: Reader
The relationship between documentary and fiction, in particular the subjectivity of recollection.

Professor Elizabeth Cowie: Professor of Film Studies; Director of Research School of Arts
Theories of representation and the subject, including psychoanalytic film theory and feminist film theory; storytelling and the cinema; the historical and theoretical study of documentary film and video art.

Dr Mattias Frey: Lecturer
European cinema (with particular emphasis on German and Austrian film); historiography; matters of media reception and consumption; the history of ‘classical' and contemporary film theory; movie criticism and cinephilia.

Dr Frances Guerin: Senior Lecturer
Silent cinema; pre-cinema; German cinema, film and history; documentary film and its intersection with history, cinema and the other arts; modernity and cinema.

Dr Tamar Jeffers McDonald: Senior Lecturer
Romantic comedy; film costume; strategies and representation of sex and virginity; performance; the gothic.

Dr Virginia Pitts: Lecturer
Processes of creative collaboration; hybrid cinematic genres and forms; the relation between technology and creativity; scriptwriting; improvisation for screen; innovative screen development techniques; cross-cultural creative practice; indigenous praxis; embodied engagement with cinema

Dr Cecilia Sayad: Lecturer
Film authorship: theories of national and transnational cinemas; Third Cinemas; narratolgoy; self-reflexivity; realism; the French New Wave; Latin American cinema (especially Brazilian); post-war American cinema; the modern American horror film.

Professor Murray Smith: Professor of Film Studies
Philosophy, film and film theory; cognitive theory, evolutionary theory and film; sound and music in film; avant-garde and experimental film/video; contemporary independent American cinema.

Dr Peter Stanfield: Director of Film Studies
The cultural history of American film, with a twin focus on cycles of formulaic movies and the synergy between cinema and other forms of popular culture, including music, comic book and sequential art, pulp novels, and material culture.

Sarah Turner: Senior Lecturer
Formal preoccupations of the avant-garde, including new narrative forms; the cinematic potential of subjective storytelling and the technologies of memory.

Dr Aylish Wood: Senior Lecturer
The impact of digital technologies on moving images in animation, film and digital games and mixed-media gallery installations; creativity and technology; human-technology interactions.

Further information:

• School website
• School staff profiles

Contact details

Admissions enquiries
T: +44 (0)1227 827272
E: information@kent.ac.uk

Subject enquiries
Film Studies Secretary
School of Arts,
Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 823177
F: +44 (0)1227 827846
E: arts-pgadmin@kent.ac.uk

Further information:

• School website
• Graduate School

Find out more

• School website
• Staff profiles
• Graduate School
• Open Days
• Order or download a prospectus