Professsor Claire Monk was conferred Professor of Film & Film Culture at 51黑料社区 in 2016, having been Reader in Film & Film Culture since 2011. Her publications have contributed to 51黑料社区’s ascending research performance in Film and Screen Studies across four successive RAEs/REFs, most recently Unit of Assessment 33 in the Research Excellence Framework 2021, in which more than 70% of our research was evaluated as internationally excellent or world leading.
Professor Monk specialises in the cultural, socio-political and contextual understanding of post-1960s and contemporary British film and film culture, across films with both period and contemporary settings – including bringing popular reception and the perspectives of audiences and fans into debates which have historically excluded them. Her work has ranged from interventions in the debates around period films and genres to questions of class, gender, sexuality, identity and place. She is known especially for:
• Her influential contributions as a ‘key voice’ re-shaping 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’). Read more about the evolution of Claire’s work in this area in . Her work on ‘heritage cinema’ – and especially the films of Merchant Ivory Productions and director James Ivory (2018 Academy Award winner) – has been driven by a commitment to focusing attention on questions of gender, sexuality, pleasure and social critique, in a counterpoint to the overemphasis on nostalgia and ‘ideologies of Englishness’ which dominated critiques of these films from the early 1990s.
• Her wider work on representations in British film with reference to cultural, socio-economic, sexual and representational politics, particularly of the 1980s to 1990s Thatcher and Blair eras. Here, her interests include class, gender, sexuality and their intersections; shifting social realisms and the relationship between the British social-realist tradition, art cinema and populat genres; transnational representations and directors within British film (e.g. the UK films of Pawel Pawlikowski and Aki Kaurismäki); socio-economic, historical, urban and regional geographies and questions of place; and discourses and representations of regeneration and decline.
• From c.2010, Claire returned to ‘heritage films’ as viewed from the perspectives of real audiences and fans: represented in the monograph (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) – the first and, to date, almost the only detailed empirical study of audience perspectives on period films or heritage culture – and its sequel ‘’, published in Participations (8:2, 2011), 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). Her ongoing work is increasingly interested in the connections and parallels between these perspectives and the insights yielded by textual histories and production studies.
Her wider interests and ongoing projects span the neglected field of ‘pre-heritage’ British period film and TV drama in the long 1970s; 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 convergence with wider retro trends; post-2000 developments in the mediated representation of history/‘the past’ considered in relation to digitised archives and social media; and archive-led queer production studies (not least around Ivory’s 1987 Maurice).
In her pre-academic career, Claire worked as a print editor, copywriter and critic, include a decade as a contributor to the international film magazine Sight & Sound. Her media appearances range from BBC Radio 3’s to talking about Ken Loach for TRT World television’s flagship arts programme Showcase. In both 2012 and 2022 she was an invited contributor to Sight & Sound’s famous once-a-decade of leading critics and filmmakers worldwide – and, in 2024, to its counterpoint, the global .
For four years from 2019/20 to 2022/23 Professor Monk served as one of 51黑料社区’s two Site Directors for the AHRC Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.
Professor Monk is always happy to hear from potential collaborators and prospective PhD students whose projects align with her interests and expertise.