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Professor Claire Monk

Job: Professor of Film & Film Culture

Faculty: Computing, Engineering and Media

School/department: Leicester Media School

Research group(s): Cinema and Television History Centre (CATH), Centre for Adaptations

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

T: n/a

E: cmonk@dmu.ac.uk

W: http://dmu.academia.edu/ClaireMonk

 

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Personal profile

My core field is the cultural, socio-political and contextual understanding of contemporary British film and film culture since the 1970s, spanning films with both period and contemporary settings – including bringing the perspectives and insights of audiences and fans into debates which have historically excluded them. I am know especially for:

(i) My contributions since the mid-1990s to the debates around the cultural politics of the ‘heritage film’ (defined by Richard Dyer as 'a text set in the past’, often ‘drawing upon a canonical source’, and ‘comprised of period costumes, decor and locations carefully recreated’). Recently, I’ve been called a ‘key voice’ in the shaping of these debates. Read more in a 2013 interview about my work in this area here: http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/screeningeuropeanheritage/956

(ii) My wider socially and contextually situated work on contemporary representations in British film, 1990–present, with particular reference to the politics – cultural, socio-economic, sexual and representational – of the Thatcher and Blair eras. Here, my interests encompass class, gender, sexuality and their intersections; shifting social realisms; transnational representations and directors within British cinema (e.g. Pawel Pawlikowski); socio-economic, historical, urban and regional geographies and questions of place; and discourses and representations of regeneration and decline.

(iii) Other interests include ‘pre-heritage’ British period cinema and TV drama in long 1970s; 1970s–1980s punk and post-punk music cultures and their impacts on British film; post-2000 trends in the ‘retro’ or historical representation of recent, late-20th-century decades in film and media in convergence with wider cultural, music and style trends; and new trends in the mediated representation of history/‘the past’ considered in relation to digitised archives and social media.

My research and publications across this spectrum contributed to DMU’s world-class research submissions to RAE2001 (UoA65), RAE2008 (UoA66), and our outstanding triumph in REF2014 (UoA36), in which we were ranked No. 1 in the UK in our subject area for 4*/world-leading outputs, and joint 1st in the UK for impact. I am always happy to hear from prospective PhD students seeking supervision in my fields of expertise.

My work on ‘heritage cinema’ (and especially the films of Merchant Ivory Productions) has been driven by a commitment to focusing attention on questions of gender, sexuality and pleasure, in a counterpoint to the overemphasis on nostalgia and ‘ideologies of Englishness’ which dominated the most influential critiques of these films from the early 1990s onwards.

My more recent work has returned to ‘heritage films’ as viewed from the perspectives of real audiences and fans: represented in the monograph Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK (Edinburgh University Press, HB 2011, PB 2012) – to date, the only detailed empirical study of audience perspectives on heritage films or heritage culture – and its refereed-journal sequel ‘Heritage Film Audiences 2.0’, which explores the forms and implications of (time-shifted, transnational) 21st-century online fandom and fan productivity, centrally around Ivory’s E. M. Forster adaptations Maurice (1987) and A Room With A View (1985

In my work in progress, I’m increasingly interested in the connections and parallels between these perspectives and the insights yielded by textual histories and production studies.

In 2012, I was one of only 26 UK academics – and 9 UK female academics – then below Professor or Emeritus level invited to contribute to Sight & Sound’s famous once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time Poll of leading critics and filmmakers worldwide.

Research group affiliations

  • Cinema and Television History Centre (CATH)
  • Centre for Adaptations

Publications and outputs

  • Invited participant in roundtable discussion as journal contributor of: ‘Such emotional sterility proves ideal for the role‘: Hugh Grant’s proto-celebrity and its media (self-)construction around Maurice
    dc.title: Invited participant in roundtable discussion as journal contributor of: ‘Such emotional sterility proves ideal for the role‘: Hugh Grant’s proto-celebrity and its media (self-)construction around Maurice dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire
  • Reconsidering ‘The Other Boat’ (1913–1947–1957): Forster’s other passage to India
    dc.title: Reconsidering ‘The Other Boat’ (1913–1947–1957): Forster’s other passage to India dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: Early reception of E. M. Forster’s posthumously surviving queer short fictions, predominantly published in 1972 in The Life to Come and Other Stories , immediately established ‘The Other Boat’ as not merely the collection’s supreme achievement – along with ‘The Life to Come’ itself – but, as Oliver Stallybrass puts it, ‘a worthy finale to Forster s fiction’ (1972: xvii). For Norman Page (1977: 60), ‘The Other Boat’ – a 11,227-word novella in 5 chapters – was ‘Forster’s finest story’. For Stallybrass, it showed Forster ‘at the height of his powers, with a tragic grandeur ... unsurpassed even in A Passage to India’ (1972: xvi). 52 years on, however, ‘The Other Boat’, along with the wider queer short fictions, remains perversely little-known or underrated among potential readers and later-generation critics, in paradoxical contrast with the rising appreciation of Forster’s gay novel Maurice (1971). This paper revisits the erotic, violent story of Lionel and Cocoanut, and the spatial, racial and colonial hierarchies and West-to-East movement of both the SS Normannia (Forster’s ‘other’ boat in more ways than one) and Forster’s narrative, to re-open the terms, contextual as well as critical, in which Forster’s ‘most erotic story’ (in the words of his 1990s biographer Nicola Beauman [1993: 255]) – and his story’s erotics – might be understood, in a text which is notable for its polysemic (and debated) ending within a wider – queer – resistance to narrative fixity or narrowly realist reading. I will also briefly consider Simon Dormandy’s experimental 2019 UK stage adaptation of ‘The Other Boat’ (titled The Point of It), which (as its title signals) interweaves ‘The Other Boat’ with two of Forster’s other ‘overlooked’ stories in a modern staging.
  • Petit’s family plot
    dc.title: Petit’s family plot dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: To encounter An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Radio On director Chris Petit’s little-seen second feature, for the first time 40 years after the film’s production is to experience a sense – or plural senses – of category confusion and evaluative uncertainty. The film’s reception in 1982 (first at the 32nd Berlin Film Festival, where it was in competition but ill-received, then on its limited UK cinema release) confirms that confused or unmet expectations featured significantly in the responses of contemporary critics, exacerbated by Petit’s (presumably calculated) constant use of ellipsis and indifference to loose ends. This essay considers and situates the film’s production and its contemporary reception in relation to the tensions between Petit’s extremely high film-cultural cachet at the time (as Time Out magazine’s Film Editor turned low-budget auteur) and his calculated commercial decision to direct Unsuitable Job as his second feature in a conscious bid for the mainstream and for industry recognition as opposed to niche acclaim. dc.description: Newly commissioned Blu-ray booklet essay for Powerhouse Films’/Indicator Blu-ray’s UK (and worldwide) premiere release of the British director Christopher Petit’s 1982 neo-noir second feature film, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (adapted from P. D. James’ 1972 novel, the first of her Cordelia Gray detective mysteries), following Petit’s iconic British road-movie debut Radio On (1979).
  • ‘In this damn country which we hate and love’: revisiting My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
    dc.title: ‘In this damn country which we hate and love’: revisiting My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: ‘I believe primarily that dramatists are story tellers. … Good writing, born of reality, is the highest form of consciousness. And it is in itself a revolt, it is criticism, protest, rebellion against kitsch, against all forms of domination, against ignorance and prejudice.’ – Hanif Kureishi, ‘The Writer’s Theatre’ (undated) Commissioned in the early years of Channel 4 television by C4’s founding chief executive Jeremy Isaacs and his ‘head of fiction’ David Rose – the founding father of Film on Four, which later became Film4 – and shot on location in six weeks on 16mm film by the Leicester-born director Stephen Frears for £650,000, My Beautiful Laundrette was not conceived as a movie for cinema release. Britain’s new fourth TV channel had launched in November 1982 with a radical vision (barely evident today) which included rethinking the relationship between TV and film in the UK. The initial plan was to offer filmmakers the chance to make features which would be screened on TV, possibly preceded by a short, promotional, cinema release. On a budget of just £6 million per year, in the first ten years Rose commissioned more than 130 completed feature-length films; half achieved a cinema release. Of these, Laundrette was the first big hit which changed the plan. My Beautiful Laundrette is and can be credited with many things: transforming C4 into the new key force in 1980s to 1990s British film production, making Daniel Day Lewis (who played Johnny) a star, launching the British independent production company Working Title (today part-owned by Universal Studios), as a bold breakthrough in gay and British Asian representation, and as a step-change in the style, tone and ambitions of British film. In line with this hybridity, the reinvention of one of the defining, most praised and debated, British films of the 1980s Thatcher decade as theatre is wholly fitting. Indeed, the theatre is where Hanif Kureishi – born in 1954 in middle-class South London suburbia to a British mother and a Pakistani father – started out as a young writer. dc.description: Essay newly commissioned by the Curve Theatre to accompany My Beautiful Laundrette: A Play by Hanif Kureishi Based on His Screenplay of the Same Name (Kureishi’s new stage adaptation of the celebrated 1985 British film, scripted by Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears), which premiered at the Curve, Leicester (20 September–5 October 2019) prior to a UK tour. The production was directed by Nikolai Foster, with music by Neil Tennant/Chris Lowe (The Pet Shop Boys). The essay was republished by the Curve in Feb 2024 for its 2024 revival, and new UK tour, of the production.
  • Forster and adaptation: across time, media and methodologies
    dc.title: Forster and adaptation: across time, media and methodologies dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: This paper seeks to advance conversations around Forster and adaptation – or Forsterian adaptation – by appraising the current state of Forster/ian adaptations scholarship and proposing conceptual and methodological tools for advancing the study of this field. As a cross-disciplinary scholar of film, adaptation, literature, popular and critical reception, and digitally enabled participatory culture, my more specific goal is to heighten and extend transdisciplinary awareness of the materials available to be studied, the available methodologies, and their merits and limitations, while identifying issues and challenges for the development of a Forster/ian Adaptation Studies. Structurally, the paper proceeds by identifying ten ‘themes’ – or important considerations – for the study of Forster/ian adaptation. The ten themes look substantially beyond ‘page-to-screen’ adaptation studies to demonstrate the roles and impacts of institutions, institutional practices, personal relations, the successive ‘new’ media of the past century and their advancing technologies and practices, commercial forces, and Forster’s literary estate (as the rights-holders and royalties beneficiaries for his works). Via this approach I call for a closer, evidence-based, attention to film and media adaptation and production processes and their adaptational consequences; and foreground the importance of the visual and unscripted – performed, embodied, intangible and even accidental – elements and determinants of audio-visual adaptation. Temporally, the paper proposes that there have been three phases of Forster/ian adaptation. Phase 1 (1942–1973) comprises those adaptations of Forster’s stories and novels written and produced (broadly) during his lifetime, always for non-cinematic media. Phase 2 comprises the 1984–1992 era of the Forster feature-films cycle, instigated by a (widely disregarded) institutional shift which brought a step-change in the nature of Forster adaptation: for the first time, the development of new adaptations of Forster’s novels, going back to the source, became the norm. Phase 3 comprises everything that comes after the 1984–1992 Forster feature films and also certain earlier adaptations which fall outside the ‘classic adaptation’ category. This third (and current) phase is characterised by its heterogeneity: adaptation to a range of media, across a range of forms and aesthetic approaches, but, I propose, spanning four main areas: Sci-Fi Forster; Queer Forster; The Revisionist or Condescending Forster Adaptation; and twenty-first-century Forsterian Bio-Drama, Bio-Fiction and ‘Literary’ Paratexts. dc.description: The online international conference E. M. Forster: Shaping the Space of Culture: 4th conference of the International E.M. Forster Society, was convened to mark the 50th anniversary of Forster’s death. It replaced the in-person Forster 50 conference to have been held at Cambridge University in Apr 2020 (at which I was also an accepted speaker), which had to be cancelled at short notice due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The online conference attracted scholars and a wider audience from six continents, with a highly engaged audience for my paper.
  • The case of My Policeman (2012/2022): sex, lies, Forster’s love triangle and promotional biofictionality
    dc.title: The case of My Policeman (2012/2022): sex, lies, Forster’s love triangle and promotional biofictionality dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: Set mainly in late-1950s Brighton, but bookended by a 1999 ‘present’, Bethan Roberts’ novel My Policeman, published by Random House in 2012, tells the story of a love triangle between two men – sophisticated art curator Patrick and his younger lover, policeman Tom – and a woman – Marion, a schoolteacher – at a date when male homosexuality remained an imprisonable criminal offence in England, prior to its partial decriminalisation in 1967. Marion, the story’s main narrator, marries Tom with no inkling of his sexuality or the true nature of his existing relationship with Patrick, which continues. On realising the truth, she acts in jealousy – and bigotry – with consequences for all three. Roberts’ novel was warmly reviewed. In contrast, the reception of its 2022 feature-film adaptation backed by Amazon Studios has been strikingly vicious (with the venom centrally directed at the casting of Harry Styles as Tom). My paper will unpick the excess of negativity towards My Policeman the film in relation to this conference’s framing concern – who may write, tell or perform a particular story? – but also by reconnecting both novel and film with Roberts’ initial biographical inspiration for My Policeman, which the published text erases. Originally billed as a novel inspired by the novelist E. M. Forster’s enduring, and extraordinary, real-life relationship with the policeman Bob Buckingham and Bob’s wife May from the 1930s until Forster’s death in 1970, My Policeman’s published text – and the film – tell an almost wholly different story, in a different timeline, less fascinating than the facts that inspired it. This last point has not been lost on some of the film’s critics. None seem aware, however, that two stage bio-dramas exploring the Forster–Bob–May relationship already exist as scripts: Scott C. Sickles’ Nonsense and Beauty, staged briefly in the USA in 2016 after a 20-year genesis; and Charles Leipart’s A Kind of Marriage which at 2017 was in development, and received a rehearsed reading at the Donmar’s rehearsal rooms in London. with Alex Jennings as Forster, but has yet to be staged. In contrast with Roberts’ My Policeman, both scripts have yet to attract rights sales (or even a full theatrical staging), reminding us of the close, and particular, relationship between ‘the adaptation industry’ and corporate book publishing (Murray 2012).
  • From costume romps to queer-cinema milestones: revisiting sexuality, gender, class (and more) through the lens of the ‘Long New Wave’
    dc.title: From costume romps to queer-cinema milestones: revisiting sexuality, gender, class (and more) through the lens of the ‘Long New Wave’ dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: The ‘post-New Wave’ films and trajectories of the key British New Wave directors in the period from 1963 onwards remain significantly underexplored terrain, particularly in terms of their potential relevance for rethinking and interrogating how we understand the ‘British New Wave’ itself and for the terms in which we might (or might not) conceptualise a ‘Long New Wave’. The individual directorial careers of Anderson, Reisz, Richardson and Schlesinger have, of course, yielded book-length studies; but the impulse in such work remains broadly auteurist, and often loyal to consensus framings of the four as pre-eminently directors of realism and social commitment. In contrast, my paper argues for the importance of two far-less-analysed areas of connection, commonality and development which emerge across the work of Richardson, Schlesinger and (in a smaller way) Reisz from the box-office triumph of Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963) onwards. First, Richardson’s successful foray into the costume romp was merely the first of several significant contributions by all three directors to a post-New Wave shake-up of the historical/costume film during the ‘pre-heritage film’ period (Monk 2021) across a spectrum of genres including ‘classic’ literary adaptation, revisionist British imperial history and twentieth-century retro. Second, the centrality of gay and bisexual directors (Anderson, Schlesinger, Richardson) and collaborations in shaping the British New Wave highlights a need to revisit the place of queerness, and the male as object of the gaze, within these filmmakers’ ‘long’ oeuvres – not least in Schlesinger’s groundbreaking direct contributions to a post-1967 queer cinema. My consideration of both strands highlights the importance of continuing director–star collaborations and, more speculatively, prompts the question of how attention to these directors’ period and queer films might inform a reassessment of the place of sexuality, gender, class and region in their earlier New Wave work.
  • ‘London. My city. It was a monstrous place.’ Mapping and materialising Georgian London in City of Vice (Channel 4, 2008)
    dc.title: ‘London. My city. It was a monstrous place.’ Mapping and materialising Georgian London in City of Vice (Channel 4, 2008) dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: For five weeks in January to February 2008, up to 2.7million Channel 4 viewers each week (an 11% audience share for the 9pm peak post-watershed slot) were hooked by the historical drama series City of Vice set in 18th-century London – and particularly by its opening sequence, in which a birds-eye-view camera travelled along the Thames from east to west, passing the Tower of London, before sweeping inland at St Pauls and continuing along Fleet Street to zoom down onto Covent Garden market and nearby Bow Street. This opening sequence was accompanied by a sombre cello, and the equally sombre narratorial voice of actor Ian McDiarmid, cast as Henry Fielding, the celebrated 18th-century novelist and dramatist, but also (less widely known) appointed in around 1748 as Magistrate of Westminster and Middlesex: London’s chief magistrate. However, City of Vice – set, with precision, in 1753 – established the Georgian capital for its viewers not by manipulating aerial filmed footage of the real city, nor via use of exterior location shots – but by filming John Rocque’s 1746 Map of London (itself a cartographic feat which had taken 10 years to complete), then using CGI techniques to bring Rocque’s map to three-dimensional life. Both this opening sequence and the wider dramatic and materialisation strategies used in each episode propelled viewers through the drawn map(ped) streets, swooping aerially across the virtual Georgian city to land at precise real locations where the 3D map burns and fuses into the filmed live-action sequences of each week’s narrative. Produced by Touchpaper Television (a subsidiary of RDF Media) and Justin Hardy’s company Hardy & Sons for Channel 4, directed by Hardy and Dan Reed, and written by Clive Bradley and Peter Harness, with the social and women’s historian Hallie Rubenhold as its historical advisor, City of Vice’s subject was the struggle – spearheaded personally by Fielding with his younger brother John Fielding (Iain Glen) (also a magistrate: ‘the blind beak of Bow Street’, blind since youth) – to give London its tiny first police force, the Bow Street Runners. The Fieldings hoped, idealistically, to bring peace and order to the brutal, chaotic, crime-ridden capital: a place of grotesque inequality and constant danger, made ‘monstrous’ by ‘commerce and trade’, where ‘everything was available, at a price’ (Fielding in City of Vice, Episode 1). Moreover, City of Vice’s storylines, as well as its overall conceit and historical London topography, drew closely on primary historical sources and documents: the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (at a date when the Old Bailey Online project’s digitisation of these records for public access was still a work in progress), the Newgate Calendar and Henry Fielding’s own diaries/memoirs. In a further innovation, Channel 4 Education commissioned an historically accurate interactive game counterpart to the series, Bow Street Runner.
  • From Costume Romps to Queer Milestones: Adaptation, Collaboration, Queerness and Modernism in the ‘Long New Wave’ of Richardson, Schlesinger and Reisz
    dc.title: From Costume Romps to Queer Milestones: Adaptation, Collaboration, Queerness and Modernism in the ‘Long New Wave’ of Richardson, Schlesinger and Reisz dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: The post-New Wave films and trajectories of the key British New Wave directors remain under-analysed terrain, both in terms of their potential relevance for interrogating how we understand the British New Wave itself and for the terms in which we might conceptualise a ‘Long’ New Wave. This essay departs from persisting auteurist approaches to consider the post-New-Wave oeuvres and careers of these directors collectively, in terms which foreground the importance of collaborations and networks rather than individual authorship and seek to decentre, denaturalise and potentially dislodge their pre-eminent association with Northern, British, social realism and its presumed legacies. I argue for the importance of a cluster of less-analysed areas of intersection and development which emerge across the eclectic filmmaking careers of Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger (and, to a lesser extent, Karel Reisz) in the immediate post-New Wave decade from the 1963 success of Richardson’s Tom Jones to the early 1970s. My discussion pivots on two commonalities: during this time, all three directors contributed significantly and plurally to innovations and advances in genre and representation across two areas distinct from British Northern working-class realism: historical/costume film genres, and queer representation. An approach which centres the (broadly defined) queer elements in these directors’ post-New-Wave oeuvres – intersecting at times with their equally undervalued contribution to ‘pre-heritage’ period cinema – reveals the ‘Long’ New Wave as substantially a cinema of adaptation, collaboration and queerness which encompassed important, near-forgotten, international projects as well as modernist influences and, in Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), a significant advance in realist queer representation. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.
  • ‘But you know, there have been queer characters from the very first film’: Call Me by Your Name and the long shadow of James Ivory
    dc.title: ‘But you know, there have been queer characters from the very first film’: Call Me by Your Name and the long shadow of James Ivory dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: The imprint of the veteran gay independent director James Ivory on Call Me by Your Name is fundamental: not merely as the 2017 film’s Academy Award-winning credited screenwriter, but via Ivory’s intimate involvement from 2007 onwards when the rights to André Aciman’s novel were first optioned. This chapter explores the contours of Ivory’s influence on Call Me by Your Name in cinematic–authorial and production–strategic terms to situate Call Me by Your Name’s remarkable 21st-century impact as LGBTQ+ cinema and same-sex romance in relation to Ivory’s longer and wider film oeuvre and to Merchant Ivory Productions’ collaborative, representational and promotional practices in their 44 years as a (widely and wilfully unacknowledged) queer filmmaking partnership. The chapter, firstly, offers a new, nuanced reading of Call Me by Your Name’s affinities with Ivory’s long-underrated affirmative gay film Maurice (1987), adapted from E. M. Forster’s posthumous 1971 novel – questioning viral social-media assertions about the ‘parallels’ between the two films which proliferated amid the rising 2017–2018 hype around the film – and, secondly, establishes Call Me by Your Name’s place and cinematic precursors within Ivory’s wider, less-known body of work beyond the ‘heritage film’ mode between 1963 and 2009, focusing particularly on Ivory’s films Slaves of New York (1988), A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998) and The City of Your Final Destination (2009). Thirdly, drawing on archive and wider primary sources, the chapter establishes the senses in which Call Me by Your Name’s exceptional crossover success owed a debt to the innovative promotional and release strategies which had been rehearsed three decades earlier in the release of Merchant Ivory’s Maurice.

Click here for a full listing of Claire Monk's publications and outputs.

Key research outputs

Recent publications

‘Pageantry and populism, democratization and dissent: the forgotten 1970s’, in Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey, eds James Leggott & Julie Anne Taddeo (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield) 2014, pp.3-21. 

‘“The shadow of this time”: tradition and history, alchemy and multiplicity in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee‘, Shakespeare Bulletin: The Journal of Early Modern Drama in Performance (Johns Hopkins UP), 2014, 32:3, pp.359-373.

‘‘If you can’t make a good political film, don’t”: Pawel Pawlikowski’s resistant poetic realism’, Journal of British Cinema and Television (‘British Cinema and TV since 2000’ special issue), 2012, 9:3, pp.480-501.

Monograph 

Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK (Edinburgh: EUP), HB 2011 / PB 2012.

Shorter key publications

‘Heritage Film Audiences 2.0: period film audiences and online fan cultures', Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies , 2011, 8:3, pp.431-477.

‘Sexuality and heritage’, in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: British Film Institute) 2001, pp.6-11. Anthologised from original publication in Sight and Sound, Oct 1995, 5:10, pp.32-4.

‘Underbelly UK: the 1990s underclass film, masculinity and the ideologies of “New” Britain’, in British Cinema, Past and Present, eds Justine Ashby & Andrew Higson (London & New York: Routledge), 2000, pp.274-87.

‘The heritage film and gendered spectatorship’, CloseUp: The Electronic Journal of British Cinema, 1997, 1. Archived in two parts at: Part 1: http://web.archive.org/web/20150131163520/http://www.shu.ac.uk/services/lc/closeup/monk.htm and Part 2: http://web.archive.org/web/20150515020017/http://www.shu.ac.uk/services/lc/closeup/monk2.htm

Book as joint editor

Claire Monk & Amy Sargeant (eds) British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film (London & New York: Routledge), 2002.

Research interests/expertise

British Film, Film Culture & Criticism, Heritage Cinema, Heritage Culture, Period Films, Period TV Drama, Literature & Adaptations, Merchant Ivory Productions, James Ivory, E. M. Forster, Gender & Sexuality, Audience & Reception Studies, Fandom & Fan Productivity, History in Media, Women & Film, Punk & Post-Punk, Retro Culture & Consumption, all these areas in Social Media.

Areas of teaching

  • Contemporary British Cinema, Films and Film Culture
  • The Past on Film: Period Film Genres and Historical Representation in Media
  • World Cinema

Qualifications

  • PhD (School of Arts: Research Studentship in Middlebrow Culture, Audiences and Taste, supervised by Professor Francis Mulhern), Middlesex University, UK, 2007. 
  • PGCert in Teaching and Learning in Adult and Higher Education, Birkbeck, University of London, UK, 1998.
  • MA with Distinction in Cinema and Television Studies, Birkbeck, University of London in association with the British Film Institute, UK, 1994.
  • BA Honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) (Exhibitioner), Balliol College, Oxford University, UK, 1986.

Courses taught

  • FILM2502 Contemporary British Cinema
  • FILM3404 The Past on Film
  • Formerly: FILM2007 & FILM2401 World Cinemas
  • PhD & MPhil supervisions
  • MRes (MA by Research) supervisions

Honours and awards

June 2016: Cinema & Television History (CATH) Research Centre, team winner of the DMU OSCAR Award for Outstanding Contribution to Research Excellence.

Membership of external committees

  • Women’s Film History Network UK & Ireland Steering Group, 2011–

Membership of professional associations and societies

  • AAS (International Association of Adaptation Studies), 2009–
  • ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Copyright Society), 2011–
  • BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies), 2012–
  • Fan Studies Network, 2012–
  • International E. M. Forster Society (by invitation), 2016–
  • MeCCSA (Media, Cultural and Communication Studies Association), 2006–

Conference attendance

Conferences and panels as organiser

Peer-review and hosting committee: Console-ing Passions: 21st International Conference on Television, Video, Audio, New Media and Feminism, DMU, 23-25 Jun 2013.

Panel organiser: ‘E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1913/1971) and 25 years of James Ivory’s Maurice (1987): adaptation(s), authorship(s) and reappraisal(s)’, 7th Annual Conference of the Association of Adaptation Studies (AAS): Visible and Invisible Authorships, University of York, UK, 27-28 Sep 2012.

Conference instigator and joint organiser: Adapting Historical Narratives Conference, DMU Centre for Adaptations, 28 Feb 2012.

Public event instigator/curator/organiser: African Classic Film Screening and Discussion: Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Badou Boy (1970), with panellists Professor Patrick Williams (Nottingham Trent University) and Lizelle Bisschoff (Director, Africa in Motion Film Festival), DMU Cultural Exchanges Festival 2010, 2 Mar 2010.

As keynote or other invited speaker

‘Messing with masculinities: Post-Thatcher British cinema’s other men since the 1990s’, Film After Thatcher: Gender and Sexuality in post-1990 British Cinema, Liverpool Hope University, UK, 2 Jul 2014. (Keynote)

‘“The shadow of this time”: tradition and history, alchemy and multiplicity in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)’, Early Modern Jarman Symposium, King’s College London, UK, 1 Feb 2014. Part of the year-long Jarman 2014 commemoration. (Invited speaker)

‘Heritage films and their audiences: fan perspectives and practices and why they matter’, Screening European Heritage, University of Leeds, 12-13 Sep 2013. An outcome of the AHRC-funded Screening European Heritage scoping study and network. (Keynote)

‘From Lypton Village to London Goth: Virgin Prunes in England, c. 1982-4’, A Special Relationship? Irish Popular Music in Britain, Northumbia University, UK, in conjunction with the University of Ulster Centre for Media Research, 27-8 June 2012 (Invited plenary speaker)

‘Web 2.0 fandom and James Ivory’s/E. M. Forster’s Maurice (UK, 1987) – or: Tumblr, LiveJournal and YouTube, the life of texts and the redundancy of “heritage-film” criticism’, Pursuing the Trivial: Investigations into Popular Culture, University of Vienna/Vienna University of Applied Arts, Austria, 1-2 Jun 2012. (Keynote, postgraduate conference)

‘Ken Loach in England: work and the working classes under neo-liberalism and globalisation’, From 'Hidden Agenda' to the 'Free World': The political films of Ken Loach, study day, BFI (British Film Institute) Southbank, London, in association with Royal Holloway University of London, 1 Oct 2011. (Invited speaker, directly after Channel 4 News / formerly BBC Newsnight Economics Editor Paul Mason)

‘Majesty/alchemy/anarchy: fashionable and unfashionable queens in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)’, Fashionable Queens: Body, Power, Gender Symposium, Institute for English Studies & Institute for Sociology, University of Vienna, Austria, 3-4 Dec 2010. (Paper delivered in absentia due to flight cancellations.) 

Keynote speaker plus film introduction to Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (UK, 2009), Radical British Screens symposium, University of the West of England (UWE) & Screen South-West Research Network, UWE/Arnolfini Arts Centre, Bristol, UK, 3 Sep 2010. 

‘Not represented: on absences, specificities and post-punk music cultures in post-2000 British film’, British Film 2000–2010: Crossing Borders, Transferring Cultures, Centre for Intercultural Studies/Faculty of Translation, Sprache und Kultur, Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, 18-21 Feb 2010. (Invited plenary speaker)

‘“Not new wave. It’s inspired by punk.” The post-punk female in British film: Hazel O’Connor and Breaking Glass’, Post-Punk Performance: The Alternative 80s in Britain, School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, UK, 9 Sep 2009. (Invited speaker)

‘Beyond the heritage debate: investigating period-film audiences’, Representation. Period: A Study Day in Representations, History and Nostalgia in Period Film and Television, University of Sussex, UK, 15 Sep 2005. (Keynote speaker alongside Professor Sue Harper)

Selected other recent papers

‘Dissecting Ripper Street (BBC-TV 2012-13, BBC-TV/Amazon 2014–): from Victorian East London to 21st-century global markets’, 10th Annual Conference of the Association of Adaptation Studies: Adaptations and the Metropolis, Senate House, University of London, UK, 24-25 Sep 2015.

‘“That’s [never] finished”: Maurice without ending, from Forster’s palimpsest to fan-text’,  E. M. Forster's Maurice: A conference marking the centenary of Forster's writing of the novel, University of St Andrews, UK, 24-25 Nov 2012.

‘Forgotten histories? Film on Four and British retro and heritage films of the 1980s’, Channel 4 and British Film Culture, University of Portsmouth/British Universities’ Film & Video Council (BUFVC) at BFI Southbank, London, UK, 1-2 Nov 2012.

Consultancy work

  • Merchant Ivory: Classics, Celluloid and Class, produced by Simon Elmes and presented by Laurence Scott for BBC Radio 3, broadcast 6 Apr 2014. Expert contributor and sole academic interviewee (alongside novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, actress Helena Bonham-Carter and others) for this programme on the films and record-breaking filmmaking and personal partnership of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter and novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. 
  • Vice magazine: consulted as expert source for a feature on BBC3’s cult series Monkey Dust (2003-5): ‘Remembering Monkey Dust: the UK’s greatest animated satire’, by Dan Wilkinson, 20 May 2015. My 2007 refereed journal article ‘London and contemporary Britain in Monkey Dust’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 4:2, was the first (and remains virtually the only) academic appraisal of Monkey Dust.
  • AHRC Screening European Heritage project, University of Leeds: interviewed as an invited leading expert source, 2,800-word interview, published 25 Jul 2013.
  • When Harry Potter Met Frodo: The Strange World of Fan Fiction, Somethin’ Else Productions for BBC Radio 4, presented by novelist Naomi Alderman, broadcast 26 Nov 2012. Consulted during the programme’s development by Somethin’ Else’s Head of Features Russell Finch.
  • Invited contributor in 2012 to Sight & Sound magazine’s world-famous, once-a-decade, Greatest Films of All Time Poll of leading critics and filmmakers worldwide, considered one of the most influential of its kind.
  • ‘Cameras in pursuit of the unfilmable’ by Andrew Johnson, Independent on Sunday, 6 Jun 2010, pp.24-25. Consulted as expert and quoted in feature on the adaptation of ‘unfilmable’ novels.
  • Contribution to project research, authorship of lead DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay, and media coverage for the British Film Institute’s Flipside DVD/Blu-ray release of three ‘lost’ films by the iconoclastic, radical, feminist 1960s-70s British filmmaker Jane Arden and her partner Jack Bond (more recently, director of the Adam Ant documentary The Blue-Back Hussar), Jul-Aug 2009. ‘Always too early’’: DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay for Separation (1967), released Jul 2009. ‘Long live the ghosts’: feature for Sight & Sound, Aug 2009.

Current research students

Professor Claire Monk welcomes enquiries from prospective research students wishing to pursue topics that connect with her research interests.

Current research students
Laura Fryer (UK), PhD (Midlands3Cities Scholarship), FT, 2nd supervisor. The Adapted Screenplays of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Else Thompson (UK), PT, 1st supervisor. A Comparative Study of the Role of Collaborative Workshops and Co-operatives within a Female-Led Filmmaking Practice.

Research students: recent completions

Françoise Poos (Luxembourg), PhD, PT, 2nd supervisor. The Making of a National Audio-Visual Archive: The CNA [Centre nationale de l’audiovisuel, Luxembourg] and the Hidden Images Exhibition, 2016.

Caitlin Shaw (Canada), PhD, FT, 1st supervisor. Remediating the Eighties: Nostalgia and Retro in British Screen Fiction from 2005 to 2011, 2015.

Andrew Johnstone (UK), MA Independent Study, PT, 1st supervisor. Documentary Film in International Development, 2013.

Llewella Burton (UK), MA Independent Study, PT, 2nd supervisor. Interpretation as Practice: Chasing the Post-Heritage Dream, 2012.

Takako Seino (Japan), MPhil, PT, de facto 1st supervisor. Realism and Representations of the Working Class in Contemporary British Cinema, 2011.

Internally funded research project information

Jan–Jun 2016: DMU Research Leave Award.

Jan–Aug 2010: DMU Faculty of Humanities Reseach Leave Award.

Professional esteem indicators

Journal Editorial Board Member

Journal of British Cinema & Television (Edinburgh University Press), 2012–
Punk & Post-Punk (Intellect), 2011–

Journal Refereeing and Peer Review for Publishers

Since 2008, for the above journals plus:

Adaptation (Oxford University Press)
Canadian Journal of Film Studies (Film Studies Association of Canada/Concordia University)
Consumption, Markets and Culture (Taylor & Francis)
Critical Studies in Media Communication (University of Illinois)
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance (Intellect)
The Minnesota Review (Duke University Press)
Rethinking History (Taylor & Francis)

And peer-review of monographs & edited collections for:
Amsterdam University Press
Bloomsbury Publishing (Bloomsbury Film & Media, USA)
British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmilan (and, during 2000-08, BFI Publishing)
Manchester University Press

Case studies

Merchant Ivory: Classics, Celluloid and Class, produced by Simon Elmes and presented by Laurence Scott for BBC Radio 3, broadcast 6 Apr 2014. Expert contributor and sole academic interviewee (alongside novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, actress Helena Bonham-Carter and others) for this programme on the films and record-breaking filmmaking and personal partnership of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter and novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

AHRC Screening European Heritage project, University of Leeds: invited expert source/witness for a scoping study that reported to European policymakers and the UK House of Lords, including a 2,800-word interview, 2013.

In 2012, one of only 26 UK academics – and 9 UK female academics – then below Professor or Emeritus level invited to contribute to Sight & Sound magazine’s famous once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time Poll of leading critics and filmmakers worldwide, considered one of the most influential of its kind.

AHRC project and conference Channel Four and British Film Culture, University of Portsmouth/British Universities’ Film & Video Council (BUFVC) at BFI Southbank, London, 1-2 Nov 2012. Plenary paper, ‘Forgotten histories? Film on Four and British retro and heritage films of the 1980s’, was a featured audio recording on the project website. (Website/URL currently undergoing updating)

‘Eyre conditioning’: invited feature on the new big-screen Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011; starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender) for Sight & Sound, Oct 2011.

Invited speaker, From 'Hidden Agenda' to the 'Free World': The political films of Ken Loach study day held at BFI (British Film Institute) Southbank, London, 1 Oct 2011, speaking directly after Channel 4 News / formerly BBC Newsnight Economics Editor Paul Mason.

Q&A panellist with veteran British social-realist film director Ken Loach, DMU Cultural Exchanges Festival 2010, 4 Mar 2010.

Contribution to project research, authorship of lead DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay, and media coverage for the British Film Institute’s Flipside DVD/Blu-ray release of three ‘lost’ films by the radical feminist 1960s-70s British filmmaker Jane Arden and her partner Jack Bond (more recently, director of the Adam Ant documentary The Blue-Back Hussar), Jul-Aug 2009. ‘Always too early’’: DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay for Separation (1967), released Jul 2009. ‘Long live the ghosts’: feature for Sight & Sound, Aug 2009

Freelance film critic for the international film magazine Sight & Sound 1993–2002, and occasional continuing contributor.

Invited talks at world-class venues including BFI Southbank (London) and the Arnolfini (Bristol). Talks at local venues engaging local communities and young people have included National Trust’s Sutton House (London Borugh of Hackney), Barking & Dagenham Malthouse Monthly Film Club (a cultural regeneration initiative in the London Borugh of Barking & Dagenham), and Phoenix Square (Leicester), including National Schools’ Film Week 2012.

Dr Claire Monk
Monk: Heritage Film Audiences book cover

Monk & Sargeant: British Historical Cinema book cover