Book Launch: Making Film, Making History: Women, Visibility and Production Cultures

The School of Media and Communication are delighted to bring you the online book launch of Dr Melanie Bell's new book, Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema.

The format of the book launch will be a roundtable discussion where Melanie Bell, Shelley Stamp and Yvonne Tasker explore the multi-faceted aspects of women’s labour in film production and their place in film histories. Opening up questions of creativity, visibility and value, the speakers will reflect on the challenges and opportunities of rewriting production history through a gendered lens, and why feminist media historiography continues to offer some of the most exciting developments in the field.  

Dr Melanie Bell’s new book, Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema, will be published in June 2021 by the University of Illinois Press. 

About the speakers 

Melanie Bell is an Associate Professor of Film at the University of Leeds and led the ‘Histories of Women in Film/TV’ project which used trade union records and oral histories to recover women’s below-the-line labour in the British film industry.  

Shelley Stamp is Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. An expert on women and early film culture, she is founding editor of the Journal of Feminist Media Histories, author of Lois Weber in Early Cinema (2015) and curator of the Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers box-set which won the New York Film Critics Circle Award in 2018.  

Yvonne Tasker is Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. An expert on feminism and gender cultures through popular media, she is currently Co-Investigator of the ‘Jill Craigie’ project which explores the political and filmmaking life of this pioneering woman director in Britain.  

Please note this event will be held online via Microsoft Teams. To request an invitation to this event, please email mediaresearchsupport@leeds.ac.uk by 12pm on Friday 2 July.