Please join us at a joint book launch for Julia & Matthew’s new books: -
Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television examines the emergence of the American post-millennial “feminist quality TV” phenomenon. While American television has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming’s cultural value, this book is the first sustained critical analysis of the twenty-first-century resurgence of this tradition. In Woman Up, Julia Havas’s central argument is that post-millennial “feminist quality television” springs from a rhetorical subversion of the (much-debated) masculine-coded “quality television” culture on the one hand and the dominance of postfeminist popular culture on the other.
Julia Havas is Lecturer in Media, as well as Deputy Programme Leader and Student Voice Committee Coordinator of the BA (Hons) Media and Communication programme at DMU. Her research focuses on convergence media, streaming, Anglo-American television, the representational politics of film and TV with particular attention to gender, race, and nation, and the transcultural flow of Eastern European film and TV. She has published extensively on these topics in leading international journals and edited collections.
Cinema Memories, co-authored by Matthew Jones (De Montfort University), Melvyn Stokes (UCL) and Emma Pett (University of York) brings together and analyses the memories of almost a thousand people of going to the cinema in Britain during the 1960s. It offers a fresh perspective on the social, cultural and film history of what has come to be seen as an iconic decade, with the release of films such as A Taste of Honey, The Sound of Music, Darling, Blow-Up, Alfie, The Graduate, and Bonnie and Clyde.
Drawing on first-hand accounts, the authors explore how cinema-goers constructed meanings from the films they watched - through a complex process of negotiation between the films concerned, their own social and cultural identities, and their awareness of changes in British society. This analysis helps the reader see what light the cultural memory of 1960s cinema-going sheds on how the Sixties in Britain is remembered and interpreted. Positioning their study within debates about memory, 1960s cinema, and the seemingly transformative nature of this decade of British history, the authors reflect on the methodologies deployed, the use of memories as historical sources, and the various ways in which cinema and cinema-going came to mean something to their audiences.
Matthew Jones is Reader in Cinema Audiences and Reception at De Montfort University, UK. He has published widely on mid-century cinema audiences and genre film and television. He is the author of Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain: Recontextualising Cultural Anxiety (2018) and the co-editor of Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Games (2015).
We look forward to seeing you there.