Professor Katy Parry

Profile

I joined Leeds in 2011. Prior to this, I was working as a research associate for the AHRC-funded project, Media Genre and Political Culture, with Kay Richardson and John Corner at the University of Liverpool, exploring the way in which media formats other than journalism portray politics. I generally write on images, politics and war.

Before completing my PhD at the University of Liverpool I also worked on an ESRC project on UK news coverage of the Iraq War, which produced the book, Pockets of Resistance: British news media, war and theory in the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Manchester University Press, 2010), with Piers Robinson, Peter Goddard, Craig Murray and Philip M. Taylor.

My latest co-authored book, with Giorgia Aiello, Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture (SAGE), was published in early 2020). This book was publlished in Italian in 2023: ‘La Comunicazione Visiva’ (il Mulino).

A co-edited book with my fellow Media, War and Conflict journal editors was also published in July 2020: Spaces of War: War of Spaces (Bloomsbury). The book provides a rich, international and multi-disciplinary engagement with the convergence of war and media through the conceptual lens of 'space'. 

Responsibilities

• Director of Research and Innovation for the School of Media and Communication

Research interests

My research interests cover a range of subjects across media and communication studies, including:

• war and the media
• representations of the military and veterans
• visual communication and photojournalism
• visual media activism, political communication
• visual research methods

I was a named Co-Investigator on Katrin Voltmer’s European Commission FP7 project, ‘Media, Conflict and Democratisation’ (MeCoDEM) exploring the interplay between the media and conflicts that accompany transitions to democracy. This project ran from March 2014–January 2017 involving eight international partner universities, with the Leeds team responsible for overall management of the project and research design. Working papers are published on the MeCoDEM website. 

Along with Aleks Krstic and Giorgia Aiello, I published a paper from this project entitled 'Visualising the politics of appearance in times of democratisation: An analysis of the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade television coverage', published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies. 

Recently my work on war and media has also focused on the representation of the military more specifically, and on the forms of self-representation produced by soldiers and veterans. A project I led on 'Representations of Contemporary Soldiering in Digital and Visual Cultures’ included conducting focus groups with military media operations teams, veteran activist groups, and other family and veteran support groups. We also held a workshop with invited representatives from each participant group to comment on the impact of our findings and engage further with some of the key issues prompted in the research (for example, the media’s role in the problematic adjustment back to civilian life).

In 2018–19 I was the lead convenor for a Sadler series seminar on ‘the war veteran in culture and society’, which invited various academics, curators, writers and veterans to discuss the culturally contested figure of the war veteran both historically and in contemporary media. I am a co-editor of the SAGE international journal, 'Media, War and Conflict'.

My work encompasses political communication in its broadest terms, engaging with both ‘top-down’ traditional politics and ‘bottom-up’ protest and activism. As a co-author of Political Culture and Media Genre: Beyond the News (2012) with Kay Richardson and John Corner I have contributed to a research focus on the more ‘cultural’ aspects of political life.

My more recent publications have explored the visibility and visuality of protest and activism, such as on the protest imagery of Pussy Riot, the visibility of protest at Thatcher’s funeral, or the way in which Twitter users responded to the death of Jo Cox MP in sharing images of solidarity and political belonging. 

During 2020–2022 I led the AHRC-funded Tim Hetherington Collection and Conflict Imagery Research Network, in partnership with the Imperial War Museum. We held public engagement workshops and brought together international photographers, reporters and film-makers, in addition to scholars and interested members of the public, to discuss Tim’s legacy as a film-maker and photographer.   

• The Tim Hetherington collection and conflict imagery network

Qualifications

• PhD: Visually Framing the 2003 Iraq Invasion in British Press Photography
• MA Latin American Studies
• BA Politics and Communication Studies

Professional memberships

• Co-convenor for the Political Studies Association's Media and Politics specialist group
• Member of MeCCSA (Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association
• Member of ICA (International Communication Association)
• AHRC Peer Review College member

Student education

In the School, I teach across political communication, visual communication, research methods, and war and media.

Research groups and institutes

• Political Communication

Current postgraduate researchers

• Jose David Ortega
• Waad Arif
• Chanapang Pongpiboonkiat
• Ziye Zang
• Chunghui Chuang