Dr Mani Sharpe

Profile

I am a film scholar specialising in cinematic representations of de-colonisation and war, particularly within the context of France and Algeria. Methodologically speaking, my research stands at the intersection between war studies, post-colonial studies, and film studies, and I am generally interested in how films convey the process of military-colonial loss through different formal techniques and themes. Before taking up my position at Leeds, I taught film studies at Newcastle University and the Sorbonne (Paris 3). I am currently the Subject Leader for Film, at Leeds.

I have recently published my first monograph, Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence, with Edinburgh University Press (Traditions in World Cinema series). More information about my book can be found in this three-minute interview, posted on YouTube, in this discussion that I conducted with Alan O’Leary for The New Review of Film and Television Studies, in this blog post, entitled ‘5 lesser-known examples of late-colonial French cinema’, or the Edinburgh University Press website, where you can download the Introduction of the book for free. In April 2023, I delivered a paper on my book at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, in Denver, Colorado. 

Apart from this focus on war, I am also interested in cinematic representations of the face – particularly in relation to questions of psychology, politics, and conflict. I was the Principal Investigator on a public engagement project, entitled Facing the Mind, funded by the Cultural Institute, Leeds. This project involved setting up a series of community-orientated workshops, blending film theory and creative practice, for a group of local residents with mental health issues. It ran online, as a series of webinars, in June 2020. A 6,000-word case study of the project was published in the journal Media Practice and Education. 

Building upon this work, I am currently editing a volume of essays entitled War Faces on Screen: Photography, Film, and the Politics of Representation. Composed of 12 chapters from a range of internationally renowned scholars, this collection is the output of an international conference that I co-organised in July 2023, with Professor Katy Parry (Leeds). Transcending disciplinary boundaries, between film theory, war cinema studies, visual studies, media studies, and art history, the aim of this collection is to explore how mediatised images of the face have been used to document the phenomenon of war. It will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. 

I am in the formative stages of writing a single-authored monograph, provisionally entitled ‘Fractured Faces: Images of Defacement in Post-War European Cinema.’

I have acted as an article reviewer for journals including Limina, French Historical Studies, New Cinemas, French Politics, Culture & Society, French Studies, and Journal of Media Practice, and as a monograph reviewer for The New Review of Film and Television Studies and Transnational Screens. 

I currently act as a judge for The Global Undergraduate Awards, marking various pieces of creative artwork, including photography, videography, design, and installations. 

Research interests

My current research stems from work conducted during my PhD, and is orientated towards analysing the form, content, and politics of a spate of ‘late-colonial’ French films made during, and in response to, the de-colonisation of Algeria, from 1954 to 1962. As part of this project, I spent several years researching a variety of cinematic narratives, publishing the outcomes in several journals, including Journal of European Studies, Journal of War and Culture Studies, and Studies in French Cinema. Many of these articles include case studies of late-colonial French films that have been overlooked by scholars, helping to both disrupt dominant views of the cinematic canon, whilst identifying an unappreciated trend in the continuum of French cinema history.

Others apply research methodologies associated with film studies to a research topic – de-colonisation – that has traditionally been dominated by historians, cultural historians, or theorists of cultural memory. In an article published in French Studies, for example, I explored the relationship between cinematic images of facial beauty and historical accounts of colonial atrocity using theoretical concepts aligned with star studies, whilst another article, published in The Journal of War and Culture Studies, connected the history of decolonisation to the critical notion of the gaze, as theorised by film scholars during the 1970s. My most recent monograph aims to build still further onto these ideas, consolidating them into a comprehensive body of research using a similarly original application of film theory to representations of French history. It will be the first ever book – in either French or English – to offer a sustained analysis of the topic.

Qualifications

• PhD Newcastle University (2010-2014)
• MA Leeds (2008-2009)
• BA Leeds (2004-2008)

Student education

I teach on a variety of modules offered by both the Centre for World Cinemas and the French Section, including modules on the history of cinema, film theory, and digital cinema. 

I am happy to supervise MA/PhD students interested in any aspect of cinema and war, as well as cinemas of de-colonisation more broadly (militant cinema, Second/Third Cinema, de-colonial cinemas). 

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures
• French
• Cinema and Television