Professor Helen Wood

Job: Visiting Professor

Faculty: Arts, Design and Humanities

School/department: School of Media and Communication

Research group(s): Cinema and Television History Research Centre, Media Discourse Group

Address: De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, UK, LE1 9BH

T: n/a

E: n/a

W: https://www.dmu.ac.uk/

 

Personal profile

Helen Wood is Professor of Media and Communications in the School of Media and Communication, having taught previously at Manchester, Worcester and Wolverhampton Universities. Her research into television and audiences has been published widely and is known through two book length studies Talking With Television (2009) and with Beverley Skeggs, Reacting to Reality Television (2012) where she has developed the ‘text-in-action’ methodology to capture the dynamic nature of television viewing. 

She has received external funding for two major projects on television. The first from the ESRC ’Making Class and Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios’ culminated in 2 books with Beverley Skeggs from Goldsmiths

The second project funded by the AHRC with Rachel Moseley and Helen Wheatley at Warwick University is currently underway, ‘A History of Television for Women in Britain’.

She is also Assistant Editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies and the journal Ethnography and Corresponding Editor of Critical Studies in Television.

Research group affiliations

  • Member of Media Discourse Research Group
  • Deputy Director of CATH research centre.
  • Member of Midlands Television Research Group (Warwick)
  • Affiliated member of Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change CRESC (Open University and Manchester University)

Key research outputs

Talking With Television (2009) University of Illinois
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/45gaf3ke9780252033919.html

From the ESRC project Making Class and Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/RES-148-25-0040/read

Reacting To Reality Television (2012) Routledge
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415693707/

Reality Television and Class (2011) Palgrave Macmillan
http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=417667

Research interests/expertise

Television, Audiences, Cultural Studies, Class and Inequality, Television History, Gender, Feminism, New Media, Social Change, Popular Culture, Media theory. 

Areas of teaching

Television Studies, Research Methods, Audiences and Fandom.

Qualifications

  • BA English and Media and Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham
  • PhD 2001 Open University