Film and Screen Media Histories

The Film and Screen Media Histories cluster supports innovative research on the evolution of film and screen cultures in their material, societal and theoretical contexts. It explores a range of instances in the history and theory of cinema and new media, and promotes a dynamic understanding of the moving image as shaped by a composite of cultural meanings, material conditions, institutional forces, and critical discourses. We employ a range of key methodologies in the area, including archival research, interviews, textual analysis, and digital tools.

Areas of excellence include the history of Hollywood cinema, Irish film, film audiences, archives, newsreels, amateur and alternative forms of filmmaking.

Recent highlights:

• Gwenda Young, Clarence Brown: Hollywood’s Forgotten Master. University Press of Kentucky, 2018.

• Ciara Chambers, Mats Jönsson, and Roel Vande Winkel, editors. Researching Newsreels: Local, National and Transnational Case Studies. Palgrave, 2018.

• Gwenda Young and Dan O’Connell. “Movie Memories.” A Creative Ireland/UCC funded project, 2018.

• Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young and Barry Monahan, editors. Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

• Pierluigi Ercole and Gwenda Young, editors. Issue 6: “Reframing Cinema Histories”. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, Winter 2013.

• Ciara Chambers, Ireland in the Newsreels. Irish Academic Press, 2012. 

Impact case study:

• Movie Memories – Gwenda Young and Dan O’Connell
  
  

Film and Screen Media Forms and Practices

The Film and Screen Media Forms and Practices cluster supports critical, theoretical and creative approaches to film and new media texts, genres and formats. We study the moving image in its specificity while also placing it at the intersection of interdisciplinary discourses on social, artistic, cultural and industrial histories, theories and practices. We seek to participate in and shape current debates in our areas and to produce methodologically reflective work. We are also engaged in creative film production, both documentary and fiction.

Areas of excellence include: contemporary cinema, art film, auteur studies, genre, transnational cinemas, gender, identities, space and place, nonfiction, the essay film, non-human animal studies, media activism.

Recent highlights:

• Jill Murphy and Laura Rascaroli, editors. Expanding Cinema: Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art, Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

• Barry Monahan, The Films of Lenny Abrahamson: A Filmmaking of Philosophy. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

• Aidan Power, Contemporary European Science Fiction Cinemas. Palgrave McMillan, 2018. 

• James Mulvey, Laura Rascaroli, and Humberto Saldanha, editors. Issue 14: “For a Cosmopolitan Cinema”. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, Winter 2018.

• Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks. Oxford University Press, 2017.

• Éire sna Nuachtscannán, a six-part television series for TG4 (LMDÓC, 2017). Ciara Chambers screenwriter and associate producer. 

• Loretta Goff and Caroline V. Schroeter, editors. Issue 13: “Screening Race: Constructions and Reconstructions in Twenty-first Century Media”. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, Summer 2017.

• Abigail Keating and Jill Murphy, editors. Issue 10: “Women and Media in the Twenty-First Century”. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, Winter 2015.

• Daniel O’Connell, Karaoke Queen, 2015. Winner, Best Art House Film, Fastnet Film Festival.

Forthcoming titles:

• Abigail Keating, Women in Irish Film: Identity and Autonomy on the Contemporary Screen, Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2023.

Laboratory for Semiotics, Ethnosemiotics, Nonfictional Studies and Audiovisuality (SENSA Lab)

Co-directors: Tatsuma Padoan (Study of Religions), Laura Rascaroli (Film and Screen Media).

SENSA website.

The Laboratory for Semiotics, Ethnosemiotics, Nonfictional Studies and Audiovisuality (SENSA Lab) promotes the comparative study of signification and communication across cultures and societies, through the analysis of social interaction, film, nonfictional media, and audiovisual texts, as produced in different domains of everyday life. The SENSA Lab aims at bringing together research on semiotics, nonfictional studies and ethnographic methods, producing innovative insights from the mutual dialogue and methodological interface between film and screen media studies, anthropology and the social sciences.

SENSA Lab interfaces with the Future Humanities Institute and its Arts Research & Practice Cluster, the MA Anthropology programme, UCC and with CARPE – Centre for Arts Research and Practice of the School of Film, Music & Theatre.