Film and Television Research Group

Research Centre

Centre for Media History

 

Research Group Details 

The Department conducts research across a range of topics in film, television and media studies, with particular concentration on the following areas:

  • Film television and media history
  • Media policy; media compliance and regulation
  • Documentary Film and Television
  • Television production and texts
  • Audience and reception research
  • Extreme and alternative cinema
  • Stardom
  • Place, landscape, television and film.
  • Children and the media
  • Experimental and avant garde film

The Department has a particular commitment to supporting research which is relevant to the cultural and social life of Wales, whilst setting it within a national and international frame of reference. Particularly important in this context is Mercator Media Research, a major EU-funded research enquiry into minority language media in Europe. The Department directs further industry-related research through the S4C Monitoring Project, run in collaboration with the National Library of Wales Screen and Sound Archive.

The Department welcomes and supports a wide range of research practices and research methods include: textual analysis; empirical data-gathering; historiography and archival research; ethnography; practice-based research; philosophical enquiry; and action research. Our aim is that this wide range of methods and practices should be able to interact productively to generate new insights and opportunities. 

Members of staff with a particular interest in research in these fields are:

 

Our research has been particularly developed and made public through:

• hosting the journal Media History (three issues per year, co-edited by Professor Tom O’Malley)
• hosting the journal Mercator Media Forum (three issues a year, edited by Elin Haf Jones)
• organising conferences, symposia and research seminars, including: ‘Communications in Wales After the Communications Act’ (2004) and ‘The Convergence Fund Seminar’ (2006); the concluding conference of The Lord of the Rings International Audience Research project (2004); the annual conference of the Society for Contemporary Legend Research (2004); a MeCCSA subject association postgraduate network conference  on audience research (2007); S4C – The first 25 Years (2007); and the International Association for Media History (2009).

 

 

 

 

The Department has been home to some important funded research projects, including:

• A Leverhulme funded research project Dr Sian Nicholas and Professor Tom O’Malley were awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant bid to the value of £249,785 for the project ‘A social and cultural history of the British press in World War II (Leverhulme ref: RGP-085), commencing 1st September 2011. The three year project is managed by Dr Sian Nicholas (Principal Investigator, Department of History and Welsh History) and Professor Tom O’Malley (Co-Investigator).

• The Department is co-organiser of the Centre For Media History with the Department of History and Welsh History. It has organised a series of international Media History conferences in 2005, 2007, 2009 and again in 2012.

• An ongoing AHRC funded Research Network entitled 'British quality, American chaos? Transnational discourses and interactions in the history of British and North American broadcasting, c.1922-1962' which draws together scholars, researchers and archivists from the UK, North America and beyond (PI: Dr Jamie Medhurst).

• An on-going series of studies carried out by the Department’s Mercator Media Research Centre, funded by the EU (Director: Elin Haf Jones), which maintains a watching brief on the state of minority language media across Europe, and the Thomson Compliance Project which reports regularly to S4C on its fulfilment of its charter.

• Audience responses to watching sexual violence on screen (research contracted by the British Board of Film Classification; 2006 – involving Professor Barker, Drs Egan and Sexton, and a doctoral student)

• The Lord of the Rings International Audience Research project (ESRC funded; 2003/4 – Professor Martin Barker and Dr Kate Egan) – exploring the nature of audience responses across the world to the films, and examining the role of fantasy in audiences’ lives;

The Department was successful in its application for an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award for working with the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).  The purpose of this project, which began in October 2009,  is to provide an opportunity for a doctoral student to explore the ways in which one chosen community of fans of ‘extreme horror’ films have made and continue to make use of the stream of technological advances across the last thirty years, in pursuit of their engagements.

Departmental staff are also working in close partnership with Boomerang plus media production group with whom we have formed a strategic partnership.   At the heart of this will be the development of innovations in multi-platform broadcasting. The aim is also to increase the knowledge transfer activity between the two partners and the Department was successful in gaining Knowledge Transfer Partnerships funding for research relating to understanding the psychological motivations of younger viewers and their 'readings' of television context.  The outcomes of this research will influence strategies for adapting Boomerang's current models of delivery and content production.


Doctoral researches in film, television and media:

Current PhD projects include: Changing conceptions of masculinity within the James Bond franchise and its reception; Virtual Worlds and New Media; the effect of digital methods on the production and uses of film in Japan; new media technologies and fans of extreme horror films; patriarchy in contemporary crime series; the representation of genocide in film; the reception and marketing of remakes of controversial films; an analysis of 21st century Steampunk cinema; the press and society in  World War 2; minority language media in Colombia and Wales