Biography

I am a DPhil student in the Media and Film department, supervised by Andy Medhurst and Lucy Robinson.  My thesis came out of an AHRC-funded MA in Media and Cultural Studies, where my research interests became more focused on interdisciplinary work on the politics of popular memory and issues surrounding popular cultural and media representations of the past.

Role

DPhil Research Student

Qualifications

MA Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex (Distinction)

BA (Hons) American Studies (Literature), University of Sussex (First)

Activities

Contributor to The Guardian's Comment Is Free, A Jubilee of Diamond-tinted Retromania. 4th June 2012.

Paper given: 'Not living in the 50s: conversations with rockabillies, hepcats and teddy boys’ at the Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change symposium at London Metropolitan University on 16^th Sept 2011

Panel member for discussion of the burlesque revival for public discussion forum 'The Brighton Salon' on 25th May 2010. http://www.thebrightonsalon.com/Sean-Bell-Reviews/sean-bell-reviews-burlesque-how-did-a-form-of-old-fashioned-strip-tease-become-a-mainstream-theatrical-art-form.html

Paper given: 'Viewing the 1950s through 1980s TV: Young People, Popular Culture and Images of the Past' at the Televising History Conference, University of Lincoln, 22nd - 25th July 2009.

Paper given: 'Representation and Experience: Popular Memory and the 1950s' at Perceptions of the Past Conference, University of Nottingham on 20th May 2009.

Co-editor of the University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History 2008 - 2009.

Co-organiser of the War, Representation and Documentary Conference held at the University of Sussex on July 11-12th 2008.

Co-organiser of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Conference held at the University of Sussex on July 1st-2nd 2008.

Paper given: 'Bettie Page: Feminist Icon?' at the MeCCSA Cultural Borrowings Conference, Nottingham University, March 19th 2008.

I am also interested in documentary, and in 2007 jointly produced and directed Kiss Me Quick: Brighton and the Dirty Weekend which had screenings at SEE: The Brighton Documentary Film Festival and The Raindance Film Festival.  I also completed A Damn Nice Caff in 2008 with Kevin Reynolds, a fellow Sussex student. 

I am broadly interested in how popular cultural representations mediate politics, history and everyday life.  My thesis analyses representations of the 1950s in British culture since the late-1970s, across a number of fields. 

Co-supervised in the Media & Film and History departments, I analyse the growing visibility and interest in 'remembering' and 'appropriating' the 1950s over approximately the last 30 years through, for example, retro style, subcultural activity and visual media.  I will interrogate the relationship between the representation and memory of the 1950s within popular culture and historicise the critical attention given to the period within cultural studies.  I foreground the ways in which different generations experience, imagine and rework elements of the past in the present through interviews with members of 1950s-influenced subcultures, alongside narratives on the memory and cultural imagery of the 1950s from the Mass Observation Archive.

Research Interests:

Representing the past; cultural history; politics of taste and lifestyle; gender and representation; life history and popular memory.