Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen is a vibrant department with diverse strands of research. You can browse staff research specialisms via the links to their staff profiles below, but otherwise can find a complete list of discipline staff on our Staff Pages.
- Dr Bárbara Barreiro León
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Dr Bárbara Barreiro León's lines of research correspond to Identities in Postmodern and Contemporary Visual and Popular Culture. She also explores the representations of cultural identities through popular culture images in wider media and visual culture, such as the Eurovision Song Contest and Music Videos
- Dr Silvia Casini
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Dr Silvia Casini's work is situated at the crossroad of visual culture and science and technology studies. She is the author of several articles on the aesthetic, epistemological and societal implications of scientific visualisation. She is also the author of two monographs: Il ritratto-scansione. Immaginare il cervello tra neuroscienza e arte (Filosofie, Mimesis Edizioni, Milan, 2016) and Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology (Leonardo book series, MIT Press, 2021).
- Dr Katya Krylova
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Dr. Katya Krylova’s research is focused on modern and contemporary German and Austrian studies. She is the author of two monographs: Walking Through History: Topography and Identity in the Works of Thomas Bernhard and Ingeborg Bachmann (2013; Winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in German Studies) and The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film, and Culture (2017). She is also the sole editor of the multi-authored book New Perspectives on Contemporary Austrian Literature and Culture (2018).
- Dr Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi
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Dr Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi has an academic background in Chilean vocational education and Latin American cultural studies. She has published peer-reviewed work on the poetics of the filmmaker Raúl Ruiz whom she assisted during his time at the University of Aberdeen. Her current research in the field of environmental humanities focuses on arts-based approaches to petroculture. She would also welcome research projects on art cinema, film and dream, and film and exile.
- Dr Calum Waddell
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Dr Calum Waddel's research is largely focused on so-called "lowbrow" cinema and what such films might tell us about place, representation and history. His first book "The Style of Sleaze, The American Exploitation Film 1959-1977" argues that American exploitation cinema be seen as a stylistic movement within cinema history. He drew further on this research by identifying Blaxploitation cinema's many transnational adaptations in apartheid-era South Africa with his monograph "Images of Apartheid: Filmmaking on the Fringe in Old South Africa". In this study, he argues that South African Blaxploitation should be belatedly accepted as an identifiable form of paracinematic engagement that localises some of the key tropes of the most famous American films, albeit often for problematic and propagandistic purposes. He continues his study of "lowbrow" cinema in South Africa with the book "South African Horror Cinema" for Bloomsbury Academic.
He has also written about race-representations and misrepresentation of ethnicity and location in mondo documentary and the Italian cannibal-horror film filone, which has been broadened by his production work on Blu-rays of many of the key motion pictures in this field. As a documentary maker much of his work has been distributed on American streaming channels such as Tubi and Night Flight Plus via the Oscar winning editor Bob Murawski. This includes his award-winning documentary on apartheid-era Blaxploitation cinema in South Africa.