| Post: | Senior Lecturer in Media, Film and Cultural Studies |
| Location: | Silverstone EDB 331 |
| Email: | A.Medhurst@sussex.ac.uk |
| Telephone numbers | |
| Internal: | 7787 |
| UK: | (01273) 877787 |
| International: | +44 1273 877787 |
Biography
BA (Sussex), MA (East Anglia)Role
Senior Lecturer in Media, Film and Cultural Studies
Departmental Research Student Convenor
Research
Andy's main research interests are British popular culture (both contemporary and historical), gender and sexuality, the genre of comedy and constructions of Englishness. He has supervised/is supervising postgraduate research on a diverse range of topics including comedy and the fat female body; the aesthetics of music video; gay men's use of the internet; the British horror film; the work of the British pop artist Vivian Stanshall; the politics of children's cinema; women's relationship to television in the 1950s; the concept of New Queer Cinema; representations in, and readings of, 'polysexual television'; discourses of success and failure in contemporary celebrity culture; horror and the body in film and literature; queer masculinities and fashion culture; questions of identity in television sketch comedy; and British cinema and Thatcherism. He has supervised more successfully completed Sussex theses than any other current member of the department and is presently Research Student Convenor for the department. He is always interested in hearing from potential research students with ideas for interesting, interdisciplinary projects.
Teaching
Andy currently convenes and teaches three undergraduate seminar courses: Contemporary British Cinema, Theory Taste and Trash and Comedy and Cultural Belonging, and one MA option, Queering Popular Culture. He also contributes lectures to first-year Media and Film courses. For details of research student supervision, see under Research Interests.
He has been the External Examiner for Media & Cultural Studies BA and MA degrees at five other British universities. He has examined PhD theses at several universities including Lancaster, London, Kent and Bristol.
Related work
Andy has also written reviews and cultural journalism for many publications (including Sight and Sound, The Wire, New Statesman, Gay Times, The Face, The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian and The Observer) and contributes frequently to arts and current affairs programmes on both radio (such as Thinking Aloud, Front Row, Today and Nightwaves) and television (such as Timewatch, The Late Show and Without Walls).
Publications
Books
A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, Routledge, 2007
Coronation Street, BFI TV Classics series, forthcoming 2008
Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction, co-edited with Sally Munt, Cassell, 1997
Selected chapters/articles (since 1990) in books and journals
'Heart of Farce: Almodóvar's Comic Complexities', in New Cinemas, Vol. 5 No.2, July 2007
'The Musical', in Pam Cook ed, The Cinema Book (3rd edn), BFI, 2007
'Mit is Kaptam ? Punk, Emlekezet es oneletrajiz' [Hungarian translation of 'What Did I Get', see below for original details] in Virag Zoltan ed Extazis es Agonia: Fuggetlen zenei (h)arcterek. Fosszilia (Szeged), 2007
'That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship' (first published in Screen, 1991), in Jackie Stacey & Sarah Street eds, Queer Screen, Routledge, 2007
'Kamp' [Polish translation of 'Camp', 1997, see below], in Poznanskie Studia Polonistyczne, Seria Literacka (Poznan) 2006
'In Search of Nebulous Nancies: Looking for Queers in Pre-Gay British Film', in Robin Giriffith ed, British Queer Cinema, Routledge 2006
'King and Queen: Interpreting Sexual Identity in Jason King' in Gough-Yates and Osgerby eds Action TV, Routledge 2002
'Tracing Desires: Sexuality in Media Texts' in Briggs and Cobley eds, The Media: An Introduction, Longman 2001
'If Anywhere: Class Identification and Cultural Studies Academics' in Munt ed Cultural Studies and the Working Class, Cassell 2000
'What Did I Get? Punk, Memory and Autobiography' in Sabin ed, Punk Rock: So What ?, Routledge 1999
'Negotiating the Gnome Zone: Versions of Suburbia in British Popular Culture' in Silverstone ed Visions of Suburbia, Routledge 1997
'Camp' in Medhurst and Munt eds Lesbian and Gay Studies, Cassell 1997
'Perverse Pop from Joe Meek to David Bowie' in Gervereau and Mellor ed Les Sixties, Somogy (Paris) 1996
'Myths of Consensus and Fables of Escape', in Jim Fyrth ed, Labour's Promised Land: Culture and Society in Britain 1945-51, Lawrence and Wishart 1995
'It's As A Man That You've Failed: Masculinity and Forbidden Desire in The Spanish Gardener' in Kirkham and Thumim eds You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men, Lawrence and Wishart 1993
'Every Wart and Pustule: Gilbert Harding and Television Stardom' in John Corner ed, Popular Television in Britain, BFI, 1991 - also reprinted in Buscombe ed, British Television: A Reader, Oxford UP, 2000
'Batman, Deviance and Camp', in Peason & Urrichio eds, The Many Lives of the Batman, BFI 1991 - also reprinted in five editions of Solomons ed, Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture, Bedford St Martins (New York), fifth edn 2006
- and in C.Lee Harrington & Denise Bielby eds, Popular Culture: Production and Consumption, Blackwell (New York) 2000