Biography

I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow. I joined the University of Sussex as Lecturer in Film Studies in January 2016. Prior to this I was Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture and the Programme Leader for the BA H Film Studies at the University of Greenwich, UK (2011-2015). During this time I also acted as Associate Editor of the journal Studies in Eastern European Cinema, and the External Assessor for the Expert Panel in Humanities at the Icelandic Centre for Research, the major distributor of research funding at postdoctoral and postgraduate level in Iceland. 

With funding from Trinity College, Cambridge and the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, I completed my doctorate at the University of Cambridge (in the Faculty of English) in 2008. My doctoral thesis, The Aesthetics of Cinematic Duration in Theory and Film, explores the ways in which materiality and slow duration affect structures of meaning in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky, as well as in the expanded spaces of film viewing, and specifically in Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle (1995-2002) and its accompanying gallery exhibitions. 

Between 2008 and 2011 I held a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, awarded to conduct research into Polish cinema in the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge (project title: Configurations of Time and Space in Polish Cinema from 1945 to 1989). I was also the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge (2009-2011) and the Associate Dean of Darwin College (2010-2011). I was involved in organising a number of research events, including co-convening the University of Cambridge Screen Media Research Seminar. 

I completed my BA H English at the University of Sydney, Australia in 2003 and received the University Medal.

Role

Senior Lecturer in Film Studies

Community and Business

I am often involved in film education projects, festivals and screenings. I have given talks on cinema for the British Film Institute (2015), the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2014), the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin (2010) the Cambridge Film Consortium (2008), and Picturehouse Cinemas (2006-2009), amongst others. I have appeared on community radio (Cambridge's Polish Waves programme) and hosted public screenings of Polish films in association with the Polish Studies Programme at the University of Cambridge. I have designed public education courses and workshops on Polish cinema (2008 and 2015), and curated film programmes for the Cambridge Film Festival (2008) and the Cambridge African Film Festival (2006-2009). I am particularly interested in addressing the communities represented in my research on Polish memory culture. In 2014 I travelled to Melbourne, Australia, to speak to members of the Katyn Family Association (family members of the victims of the 1940 Katyn massacre) and the Syberiak Association (survivors of Soviet deportations) on my research into the representation of the Katyn massacres onscreen.