Dr Rhys Steven Jones
- Position: Teaching Fellow in Film Studies
- Areas of expertise: media studies; film theory; contemporary literary studies; theories of social reproduction, racialisation and gender; speculative fiction and film; philosophies of disgust; queer theory; Marxism
- Email: R.Jones2@leeds.ac.uk
- Website: | ORCID
Profile
I am currently working as a Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the University of Leeds, having previously worked as a lecturer at Birkbeck and Liverpool John Moores University. My PhD thesis (which passed without corrections) maps the dynamics of socio-cultural abjection against their political-economic determinants and effects through close formal analyses of critical theory and contemporary cinema. I have an article on abjection in world cinema forthcoming in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory and have recently published an entry on ‘Racial Capitalism’ for The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.
Research interests
My research spans a range of cinematic, theoretical and literary texts, including but not limited to:
Cultural texts
- queer world cinema(s)
- representations of waste and surplus in post-millennial cinema
- speculative film and fiction
- twentieth and twenty-first century American cinema (A Birth of A Nation, Night of the Living Dead, It Follows)
- post-war European cinemas (New Wave cinemas; Italian Neorealism; Dogme 95)
- reality television
Cultural theory
- Marxism
- queer theory
- Postmodernism (film, art, architecture and literature)
- theories of social reproduction, gender, and racialisation
- philosophies of disgust and their colonial origins
- Afro-Pessimism and black cultural theory
- theories of abjection
- affect theory
I am currently working on a monograph which maps the dynamics of socio-cultural abjection on a global scale against their political-economic determinants and effects through close formal analyses of critical theory and contemporary world cinema.
<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>Student education
I am currently teaching undergraduate modules on topics including: introduction to film studies, directing world cinema, critical approches to screen studies, post-war European cinema, final year projects, and postgraduate modules on film arts and industries, independent projects and dissertations.
Before joining the department at Leeds I worked at Birkbeck, where I was the programme director for their MA Contemporary Literature and Culture, and prior to that I worked as a lecturer in film studies at the Liverpool Screen School.