University of Bristol

Faculty Member, Drama: Theatre, Film, Television

Senior Lecturer in Screen Media, Head of Education

About

I'm interested in the production of place and space in small-screen documentary — from the ways in which screen media actively and ‘performatively’ make place through to the fluid materialities of production and reception contexts. To that end I try to think about the ways in which archaeology, heritage and material culture are presented and received across television and convergent media; media audiences and reception; technological change and media, specifically the impact of new database technologies on moving image material; documentary sound and the production of space and place. More recently, I've been attempting to work through the relationships between archaeology and moving image practices in and around the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games.

I'm currently finishing papers on this topic for World Archaeology and for the volume I am co-editing: the Oxford Handbook of Archaeologies of the Contemporary World, with Rodney Harrison and Paul Graves-Brown (2013).

While much of my time is taken up with the administrative and managerial responsibilities of running my department's undergraduate curriculum, I do spend some time on funded research projects. I'm currently a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Into the Future project (PI, Prof Simon Jones), which is developing ways to bring the video archives of the National Review of Live Art online using Drupal and the STARS (sematic tools for arts research) platform together. I'm also a co-investigator on the EPSRC-funded University of Local Knowledge project. This is a collaboration between Knowle West Media Centre, University of Bristol (Computer Science and Drama: Theatre, Film, Television) and University of West of England. The project, led by Mike Fraser, is developing ground-up tools for empowering community experts.

I am currently supervising 2 PhD students. Greg Bailey is working on a practice-based PhD in archaeology and the moving image. Simon Taffel is completing a PhD (co-supervised by Jon Dovey) that uses the ecological theories of Bateson and Deleuze to understand environmental and activist blogging.

I am also programme director of the MA in Archaeology for Screen Media, run jointly by the departments of Archaeology & Anthropology and Drama: Theatre, Film, Television.

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