The Film Studies unit within the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University is pleased to offer a three year full-time PhD studentship commencing in April 2016. The successful applicant will receive an annual bursary of £7,000 for three years (with no inflation increase), and fees will be paid by the University. The candidate will need to demonstrate that in addition to the studentship other funding is available for them to successfully complete the programme in full-time study.

Area of research: New Cinema History: Reconstructing film culture through memories, cinema-going practices and film consumption

Since the mid-1980s, cinema historians have insisted on the importance of researching the distribution, exploitation and reception of film, instead of solely concentrating on its production context. This research strand - now defined as New Cinema History (Maltby, Stokes & Allen 2007; Maltby, Biltereyst & Meers 2011) - has greatly enhanced and expanded the field of cinema studies as it acknowledges the diversity in film production, distribution, exhibition, but above all the overtly ignored cinema audiences. New Cinema History envisions a social history of a cultural institute aimed to identify film as a cultural artifact consumed by a variety of audiences. Using socio-economic, ethnographic and other methods, New Cinema History has underlined the heterogeneity of cinema cultures and the influence of the social, cultural and historical conditions such as region, class, race and ideology. In order to engage with cinema cultures in their social, historical and cultural context of everyday life, scholars left the field of broad generalizations and large quantitative research designs to focus on close, detailed studies of specific places, people and chronologies.

The aim of the research is to tap into one of the unexplored film practices looking at a specific European case study from the post-war period to the present. The project can be fully inscribed into the Arts and Media sector, but through its analysis, is tangent to other social and scientific fields such as: social science, tourism, anthropology, geography and cultural heritage studies.

The research proposal should aim:

To uncover aspects of film culture (cinema-going practices, exhibition and distribution strategies, etc.) taking one or some European countries as case-studies for the investigation
To explore the audiences’ point of view by collecting oral evidence, as well as questionnaires, audience-focus groups and interviews
To make use of creative methodologies (geographical, anthropological, statistical, etc.) in order to to understand the manner in which film texts are embedded in the wider social histories of popular entertainment, consumption, and domestic leisure.

How to apply: Please request an application pack from Ms Anna Guarnieri tdestudentships@brookes.ac.uk, quoting ‘New Cinema History’ in the subject line.