Impact
The Centre was known as the Centre for World Cinemas from its inception in 2000 until July 2015. The first of its kind in the country, it has distinguished itself by taking a positive, inclusive and democratic approach to film studies, specialising in the situated study of cinematic forms. Since August 2015 the Centre has expanded its remit to embrace digital cultures. This is in recognition of the huge importance of digital technologies for film production and distribution, as well the need to engage with the wealth of creativity that new media has provoked in all sorts of different cultural contexts.
For more information on what we do, please contact Professor Paul Cooke at p.cooke@leeds.ac.uk
World cinemas and digital cultures in the local area
Both Leeds and neighbouring Bradford have longstanding traditions in the promotion of cinema and have more recently taken the lead in the promotion of local digital culture. Leeds hosts a major international film festival every autumn and boasts a historic art-house cinema, the Hyde Park Picture House. In the field of digital culture, Leeds hosts a digital festival every Spring as well as a number of live coding 'algoraves' and hacking events. Bradford is home to the National Media Museum (formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television), which also has gallery space dedicated to the development of the internet (Life Online), and houses the National New Media Collection.
Leeds Creative Labs also promotes collaboration between academics and local cultural institutions and creative innovators. One of its main aims is to help understand how the arts and technology can inform and support research relevant to contemporary society.
Our research
Staff working in the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures research a wide variety of cultural forms (film, videogames, the internet, television and more), in a wide variety of different contexts around the globe, using a range of different theoretical and methodological approaches. See our directory for details of our projects.
Past visiting researchers and lecturers
Previous student research projects
PhD
- Lee Broughton: Rethinking the Western genre's evolutionary model: hybridity, transculturation and national European cinemas
- Tiago De Luca: Realism of the Senses: a Tendency in Contemporary World Cinema
- Tatiana Heise: Contested National Identities in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema
- Matthew John: The Concentrationary Image: Aesthetics and the Camps
- Olivier Mazuy: Neorealism in French cinema from 1993 onwards
- Sarah Metcalf: Chains of Liberty: Desire and Eroticism in the Films of Jan Svankmajer
- Laura Rodriguez: Branding Latin America: Distributing and marketing Latin American films in the global market
- Paul Sturtevant: Based on a True History: Medieval Narratives in Modern Film
MA by Research
- Ashley Beedaysee: Representations of Joan of Arc: From Medieval Literary Heroine to Cinematic Icon
- Antonio M. da Silva: Brazilian Women in Prison (WIP) Films: A Gendered Reading
- Martha Jurksaitis: Film and Orga(ni)sm: Synaesthesia and the Revolting Body
- Anne Murphy: War, Resistance, and Neo-Realism in Italian Cinema
- Rachael Plant: Perpetrators, victims and redemptive resistance in Sophie Scholl: Die Letzten Tage (2005) and Die Falscher (2007)
- James Rose: The Living and the Dead: the Gothic Monsters of Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth
- Charlotte Sharman: Hybridity in contemporary mainstream transnational cinemas
- Lucy Townsend: Gender and Politics: The Impact of Feminism in Italian Political Cinema, 1968-1990