Current Teaching

Undergraduate:

I lead two second-year option modules: Documentary Film Theory and History, Documentary Film Practice and a third-year option module: Transgressive Cinema: Advanced Film Practices.

I contribute lectures and workshops to two core modules: Introduction to Film Studies, Global Cinema: Forms, Debates

Postgraduate:

I supervise MA dissertations (practice and theory based) and contribute lectures on the MA in Film Studies modules such as: Research Methods in Contemporary Film Theory

PhD Supervision:

Siyue Liu

Profile

I’m an interdisciplinary researcher and practitioner, whose work bridges art theoretical analysis, film criticism, and practice-based investigations in film, video, and performance. With a specialisation in moving image practices of 20th-century Avant-garde and Experimental Cinema, my broader research engages with political aesthetics in contemporary art. Central to my inquiry are questions around the representation of the oppressed and the power relations between artwork and viewer, especially in relation to race, gender identity, and agency. A key outcome of this research focus is the peer-reviewed essay “Forensic Architecture: The Whole Truth?” published in Millennium Film Journal (2021), which critically examines the investigative aesthetics employed by Forensic Architecture and their claims to truth. Building on this, an upcoming co-authored book chapter with Martin Zeilinger, titled “AI Art and the Foreclosure of Ecological Agency: A Critique of Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth,” pushes in a similar critical direction, and interrogates how the aesthetic constructions of Anadol’s AI art diminish audience agency.

In parallel, my practice-based research investigates the radical political potential of aesthetic negation—through absence, distortion, or deconstruction—as a means to subvert dominant visual cultures and foster radical spectatorship. This work, which includes videos and live cinematic performances, is encapsulated in the ongoing series Media Blackout and has been showcased at national and international venues. Scholarly outputs aligned with this practice include two peer-reviewed book chapters that further expand the discourse on moving image and politics.

PhD Supervision Interests

I welcome PhD proposals in the following areas and related fields: • Practice-based or research-led work in artists' moving image, including experimental and expanded cinema • Aesthetic strategies of absence in representing violence and trauma • Histories and legacies of avant-garde film and radical aesthetics • Feminist film theory and practice, with a focus on intersectionality • Queer aesthetics • Politics of representation in contemporary media • Critical approaches to AI, algorithmic aesthetics, and machinic vision in moving image • Film and ideology, including apparatus theory, spectatorship, and cultural hegemony • Marxist and post-Marxist approaches to film, aesthetics, and media economies