Research interests

• Popular genres
• Film aesthetics
• Italian cinema
• Horror
• Melodrama

Current research

I am currently researching contemporary narrative cinema in relation to ideas of temporality. I see the artistic treatment of time as a way of making meaning of the world; at the same time that it is an aesthetic quality at the basis of cinematic pleasure. I am interested in relating this artistic treatment to a contemporary moment where ideals of progress seem so difficult to believe in.

I am maintaining my research interests in Italian cinema and am currently working on essays about the popular in Italian cinema; Federico Fellini's collaboration with Anita Ekberg; the actor/producer Riccardo Scamarcio; and the moral philosophy of the giallo.

This latter essay also coincides with my ongoing interest in horror. I am co-editing with Kevin Donnelly a book on Folk Horror: The Return of the British Repressed.

I am active in PhD supervision and I supervise a range of students who together give the department a special interest in horror research. I supervise PhDs that tend to have a particular focus on questions of film aesthetics and/or on popular genres. This has brought me a range of research students working on projects beyond horror, and these include PhDs on documentary and environmentalism, silence and music, art cinema, spaghetti westerns, melancholy and Guru Dutt, Chinese Neo-Noir, Sino-US co-production and memories of Versailles in French cinema.

I currently convene the undergraduate modules Film Noir and Film, Realism and Reality (which is about realist and documentary cinema). I supervise dissertation students according to my expertise, which is especially in areas of horror cinema, popular genres, Italian cinema, aesthetics and film theory. 

I am convenor of the MA dissertation modules and I also supervise MA dissertations in line with my expertise as mentioned above. I also contribute to the Classical Film Theory MA module.

I studied at the Universities of Glasgow, Warwick and King's College, London, where I completed my AHRC-funded PhD research on post-war Italian melodrama. I published this research in 2014 with the title The Operatic and the Everyday in Post-war Italian Film Melodrama (Edinburgh University Press). I have also published on a range of other areas to do with Italian cinema, popular genres and aesthetics and am the author of the forthcoming collection of essays, Il cinema italiano: scritti su un'arte popolare, published by Meltemi.

More recently I have been concentrating on political analyses of retro, neoliberalism and nostalgia in contemporary cinema, journey narratives on film, as well as writing reviews for a range of publications. I have co-edited a range of volumes including Popular Italian Cinema, Journeys On Screen: Theory, Ethics and Aesthetics (which won an Honourable Mention in the BAFTSS  Best edited collection prize, 2020), Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed as well as a special journal edition on Rome Open City, and on Memories of the Future: Historical Temporalities in Contemporary Film and Television.

I am developing a new research project on experiences of time as both an aesthetic and a political aspect of contemporary cinema. I organised the annual BAFTSS conference in 2021, which was hosted by the University of Southampton online on the topic of 'Time and the Body in Film, Television and Screen Studies'. I am Secretary of the Executive Committee of BAFTSS, a position elected by the BAFTSS membership. I have taught in Universities in the UK and in Rome, and have taught at the University of Southampton since September, 2015.

Prizes