History of Art and Film at Leicester

Research

Our staff have research strengths in a number of key areas, including:

  • Italian art 1300-1700
  • The collecting of art
  • British and American cinema and television history
  • Women directors and the Hollywood film industry
  • Popular culture, comics, and film serials
  • East Asian cinemas
  • European cinema
  • Transnational cinema
  • Film theory and philosophy
  • Feminism, gender, and film
  • Cinematic cities
  • Film genres
  • Cinema, diaspora and migration

We have a proven track record of publication in respected journals and with prestigious presses. We also actively pursue new ways of conducting and disseminating our research as widely as possible. This might involve setting up innovative interdisciplinary collaborations with other academics, technical specialists and art institutions, curating major international exhibitions, hosting events targeted at the general public, creating interactive websites, and so on. Recent projects include Professor Ekserdjian's work on the attribution of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi and Dr Feng's ‘Shanghai Made in Hollywood’.

We work extensively as peer-reviewers for publishing houses such as Yale, Manchester, Edinburgh and Routledge, as well as for more than a dozen international academic journals.

We take key advisory roles for important institutions and organisations such as the National Gallery, the Tate, the Royal Academy, the Sir John Soane's Museum, and International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST).

Our staff have also been involved in the staging and curation of exhibitions at a local, national and international level, and have worked on important exhibitions at institutions including the Royal Academy and National Gallery, Tate and the Hepworth Wakefield, the Scuderie del Quirinale and the Yale Center for British Art.

Our reach beyond academia can be further underlined by frequent media appearances on radio and television, such as Sky Arte (Italy) and BBC Leicester. 

We encourage PhD applications in any of our key research areas. However, we are also keen to take on topics outside any one individual’s direct area of speciality, and we regularly set up PhD supervisory teams that allow for unusual and innovative topic combinations according to the student’s interests, so do please send us your enquiry.

Please see individual staff profiles for further details of research activities and publications. You can also visit the School of Arts' events page for details of upcoming conferences, symposia, and workshops. 

Research projects

Find out more about our featured research projects:

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