Dr Elizabeth i Watkins

Profile

My research focuses on film histories of colour and the archive, gesture, feminist theory, the aesthetics and ethics of the retrospective digitsation and colourisation of black-and-white photochemical images and film texts.

I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds and a Research Associate for a project on ‘Colour Films in Britain 1900-1955’ at the University of Bristol. My research has been supported by a British Academy Small Research Grant, and fellowships at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the University of Oxford.

I initiated and convene BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG with Sarah Street and Vicky Jackson, who are based at the University of Bristol. The research group  has organised seminars on topics including ‘Colourisation’, ‘Global Film Color’ and  ‘Teaching Colour.’ I oversaw the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Research Network of Scholarly Interest Groups (2019-2024) and was elected as Chair of the Association (2022-24).

Forthcoming publications include a monograph on Colour, Film, Theory and the Archive (Routledge) and a book Andrea Arnold, Unsettling Cinematic Percpetion (Edinburgh University Press). I am co-editing a collection of essays on Polar Photography and Film, and a special issue journal on Colourised Histories: Reading Digital/Analogue Photography and Film Archives Now.

Books

• Gesture and Film: Signalling New Critical Perspectives, eds. Nicholas Chare and Liz Watkins (London: Routledge, 2017) (ISBN: 978-1-138-90019-6).
• Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive, eds. Brown, Street, Watkins (New York: Routledge, 2013) (ISBN 9780415892643).
• British Colour Cinema: Practices and Theories, eds. Brown, Street, Watkins (London: BFI/ Bloomsbury, 2013) (ISBN: 9781844574131).
• ‘The Spectacle of Nothing: the image, material and object in a photographic ecosystem of Antarctica’, Photographies (2021) vol.14, no.3. pp.481–503.
• ‘The Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive’ , Comparative Cinema, special issue on color, (2021) Vol.IX, No. 17. pp.123–145.
• ‘The Strange Art of Scientific Photography: Anomalous Images of Antarctic Exploration’ in The Empiricism of the Gaze. The Assignment of Meanings to Scientific Expedition Photography, eds. Gisela Parak / Elke Bauer (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2021), pp.74–85.
• 'Liminal Perceptions: Intermediality and the Exhibition of Early Non-fiction Film', eds. Giovanna Fossati, Victoria Jackson, Bregt Lameris, Elif Rongen Kaynacki, Sarah Street, Joshua Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic, Chromatic World of Silent Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) pp.51–73.
•  'Mapping the Antarctic: Photography, Colour and the Scientific Expedition in Public Exhibition', Progress in Colour Studies, , eds. Carole Biggam, Lindsay Macdonald, Galina Paramei (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2018) pp.439–459.
• 'Don't Look Now: Transience and Text', Screen (2016) vol.56, issue.4, pp.436–449.
• 'Unsettling Perceptions: Screening Surveillance and the Body in Red Road', Paragraph (2015) vol.38, no.1, pp.101–107.
•  'The Disquiet of the Everyday: Gesture and Bad Timing', Journal for Cultural Research (2015) vol.19, no.1, pp.56–68
• 'Colour Consciousness and Design in Blanche Fury as Technicolor Melodrama', Journal of British Cinema and Television (2010) 7, 1, pp.53–68.
• 'Cinematic Excess',  Film Theory Encyclopedia , eds. Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland (Routledge, 2013) pp.178–181.
•  'The Materiality of Film', The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, eds. Paul Graves-Brown, Rodney Harrison and Angela Piccini (Oxford University Press, 2014) pp.574–590.
• 'Herbert G. Pontings Materials and Texts', Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive, eds. Simon Brown, Sarah Street and Liz Watkins (New York: Routledge, 2013) pp. 322–335.
• Liz Watkins and Nicholas Chare, 'The Matter of Film: Decasia and Lyrical Nitrate', Carnal Knowledge: Towards a New Materialism Through the Arts, eds. Barbara Bolt and Estelle Morris (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012) pp.75–88.
• 'The (dis)articulation of Colour: Cinematography, Femininity and Desire in Jane Campion’s In the Cut' , Questions of Colour in Cinema: From Paintbrush to Pixel, ed. Wendy Everett (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007) pp.197–216.

.

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Some research projects I'm currently working on, or have worked on, will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Leeds
• MA, University of Leeds
• BA Hons, University of Bradford
• PGCLTHE, University of Leeds
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Professional memberships

• British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies
• Society of Cinema and Media Studies
• Colour Group, GB