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Professor Claire Monk

Job: Professor of Film & Film Culture

Faculty: Computing, Engineering and Media

School/department: Leicester Media School

Research group(s): Institute of Arts, Design & Performance: Creative Practices & Histories, Cinema and Television History (CATH), Adaptations

Address: ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ, The Gateway, Leicester, UK, LE1 9BH

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E: cmonk@dmu.ac.uk

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Personal profile

Professsor Claire Monk was conferred Professor of Film & Film Culture at ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ in 2016, having been Reader in Film & Film Culture since 2011. Her publications have contributed to ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ’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 ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ’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.

Research group affiliations

Publications and outputs


  • dc.title: Invited participant in roundtable discussion as journal contributor of: ‘Such emotional sterility proves ideal for the role‘: Hugh Grant’s proto-celebrity and its media (self-)construction around Maurice dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire

  • dc.title: Reconsidering ‘The Other Boat’ (1913–1947–1957): Forster’s other passage to India dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: Early reception of E. M. Forster’s posthumously surviving queer short fictions, predominantly published in 1972 in The Life to Come and Other Stories , immediately established ‘The Other Boat’ as not merely the collection’s supreme achievement – along with ‘The Life to Come’ itself – but, as Oliver Stallybrass puts it, ‘a worthy finale to Forster s fiction’ (1972: xvii). For Norman Page (1977: 60), ‘The Other Boat’ – a 11,227-word novella in 5 chapters – was ‘Forster’s finest story’. For Stallybrass, it showed Forster ‘at the height of his powers, with a tragic grandeur ... unsurpassed even in A Passage to India’ (1972: xvi). 52 years on, however, ‘The Other Boat’, along with the wider queer short fictions, remains perversely little-known or underrated among potential readers and later-generation critics, in paradoxical contrast with the rising appreciation of Forster’s gay novel Maurice (1971). This paper revisits the erotic, violent story of Lionel and Cocoanut, and the spatial, racial and colonial hierarchies and West-to-East movement of both the SS Normannia (Forster’s ‘other’ boat in more ways than one) and Forster’s narrative, to re-open the terms, contextual as well as critical, in which Forster’s ‘most erotic story’ (in the words of his 1990s biographer Nicola Beauman [1993: 255]) – and his story’s erotics – might be understood, in a text which is notable for its polysemic (and debated) ending within a wider – queer – resistance to narrative fixity or narrowly realist reading. I will also briefly consider Simon Dormandy’s experimental 2019 UK stage adaptation of ‘The Other Boat’ (titled The Point of It), which (as its title signals) interweaves ‘The Other Boat’ with two of Forster’s other ‘overlooked’ stories in a modern staging.

  • dc.title: Petit’s family plot dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: To encounter An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Radio On director Chris Petit’s little-seen second feature, for the first time 40 years after the film’s production is to experience a sense – or plural senses – of category confusion and evaluative uncertainty. The film’s reception in 1982 (first at the 32nd Berlin Film Festival, where it was in competition but ill-received, then on its limited UK cinema release) confirms that confused or unmet expectations featured significantly in the responses of contemporary critics, exacerbated by Petit’s (presumably calculated) constant use of ellipsis and indifference to loose ends. This essay considers and situates the film’s production and its contemporary reception in relation to the tensions between Petit’s extremely high film-cultural cachet at the time (as Time Out magazine’s Film Editor turned low-budget auteur) and his calculated commercial decision to direct Unsuitable Job as his second feature in a conscious bid for the mainstream and for industry recognition as opposed to niche acclaim. dc.description: Newly commissioned Blu-ray booklet essay for Powerhouse Films’/Indicator Blu-ray’s UK (and worldwide) premiere release of the British director Christopher Petit’s 1982 neo-noir second feature film, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (adapted from P. D. James’ 1972 novel, the first of her Cordelia Gray detective mysteries), following Petit’s iconic British road-movie debut Radio On (1979).

  • dc.title: ‘In this damn country which we hate and love’: revisiting My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: ‘I believe primarily that dramatists are story tellers. … Good writing, born of reality, is the highest form of consciousness. And it is in itself a revolt, it is criticism, protest, rebellion against kitsch, against all forms of domination, against ignorance and prejudice.’ – Hanif Kureishi, ‘The Writer’s Theatre’ (undated) Commissioned in the early years of Channel 4 television by C4’s founding chief executive Jeremy Isaacs and his ‘head of fiction’ David Rose – the founding father of Film on Four, which later became Film4 – and shot on location in six weeks on 16mm film by the Leicester-born director Stephen Frears for £650,000, My Beautiful Laundrette was not conceived as a movie for cinema release. Britain’s new fourth TV channel had launched in November 1982 with a radical vision (barely evident today) which included rethinking the relationship between TV and film in the UK. The initial plan was to offer filmmakers the chance to make features which would be screened on TV, possibly preceded by a short, promotional, cinema release. On a budget of just £6 million per year, in the first ten years Rose commissioned more than 130 completed feature-length films; half achieved a cinema release. Of these, Laundrette was the first big hit which changed the plan. My Beautiful Laundrette is and can be credited with many things: transforming C4 into the new key force in 1980s to 1990s British film production, making Daniel Day Lewis (who played Johnny) a star, launching the British independent production company Working Title (today part-owned by Universal Studios), as a bold breakthrough in gay and British Asian representation, and as a step-change in the style, tone and ambitions of British film. In line with this hybridity, the reinvention of one of the defining, most praised and debated, British films of the 1980s Thatcher decade as theatre is wholly fitting. Indeed, the theatre is where Hanif Kureishi – born in 1954 in middle-class South London suburbia to a British mother and a Pakistani father – started out as a young writer. dc.description: Essay newly commissioned by the Curve Theatre to accompany My Beautiful Laundrette: A Play by Hanif Kureishi Based on His Screenplay of the Same Name (Kureishi’s new stage adaptation of the celebrated 1985 British film, scripted by Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears), which premiered at the Curve, Leicester (20 September–5 October 2019) prior to a UK tour. The production was directed by Nikolai Foster, with music by Neil Tennant/Chris Lowe (The Pet Shop Boys). The essay was republished by the Curve in Feb 2024 for its 2024 revival, and new UK tour, of the production.

  • dc.title: Forster and adaptation: across time, media and methodologies dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: This paper seeks to advance conversations around Forster and adaptation – or Forsterian adaptation – by appraising the current state of Forster/ian adaptations scholarship and proposing conceptual and methodological tools for advancing the study of this field. As a cross-disciplinary scholar of film, adaptation, literature, popular and critical reception, and digitally enabled participatory culture, my more specific goal is to heighten and extend transdisciplinary awareness of the materials available to be studied, the available methodologies, and their merits and limitations, while identifying issues and challenges for the development of a Forster/ian Adaptation Studies. Structurally, the paper proceeds by identifying ten ‘themes’ – or important considerations – for the study of Forster/ian adaptation. The ten themes look substantially beyond ‘page-to-screen’ adaptation studies to demonstrate the roles and impacts of institutions, institutional practices, personal relations, the successive ‘new’ media of the past century and their advancing technologies and practices, commercial forces, and Forster’s literary estate (as the rights-holders and royalties beneficiaries for his works). Via this approach I call for a closer, evidence-based, attention to film and media adaptation and production processes and their adaptational consequences; and foreground the importance of the visual and unscripted – performed, embodied, intangible and even accidental – elements and determinants of audio-visual adaptation. Temporally, the paper proposes that there have been three phases of Forster/ian adaptation. Phase 1 (1942–1973) comprises those adaptations of Forster’s stories and novels written and produced (broadly) during his lifetime, always for non-cinematic media. Phase 2 comprises the 1984–1992 era of the Forster feature-films cycle, instigated by a (widely disregarded) institutional shift which brought a step-change in the nature of Forster adaptation: for the first time, the development of new adaptations of Forster’s novels, going back to the source, became the norm. Phase 3 comprises everything that comes after the 1984–1992 Forster feature films and also certain earlier adaptations which fall outside the ‘classic adaptation’ category. This third (and current) phase is characterised by its heterogeneity: adaptation to a range of media, across a range of forms and aesthetic approaches, but, I propose, spanning four main areas: Sci-Fi Forster; Queer Forster; The Revisionist or Condescending Forster Adaptation; and twenty-first-century Forsterian Bio-Drama, Bio-Fiction and ‘Literary’ Paratexts. dc.description: The online international conference E. M. Forster: Shaping the Space of Culture: 4th conference of the International E.M. Forster Society, was convened to mark the 50th anniversary of Forster’s death. It replaced the in-person Forster 50 conference to have been held at Cambridge University in Apr 2020 (at which I was also an accepted speaker), which had to be cancelled at short notice due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The online conference attracted scholars and a wider audience from six continents, with a highly engaged audience for my paper.

  • dc.title: The case of My Policeman (2012/2022): sex, lies, Forster’s love triangle and promotional biofictionality dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: Set mainly in late-1950s Brighton, but bookended by a 1999 ‘present’, Bethan Roberts’ novel My Policeman, published by Random House in 2012, tells the story of a love triangle between two men – sophisticated art curator Patrick and his younger lover, policeman Tom – and a woman – Marion, a schoolteacher – at a date when male homosexuality remained an imprisonable criminal offence in England, prior to its partial decriminalisation in 1967. Marion, the story’s main narrator, marries Tom with no inkling of his sexuality or the true nature of his existing relationship with Patrick, which continues. On realising the truth, she acts in jealousy – and bigotry – with consequences for all three. Roberts’ novel was warmly reviewed. In contrast, the reception of its 2022 feature-film adaptation backed by Amazon Studios has been strikingly vicious (with the venom centrally directed at the casting of Harry Styles as Tom). My paper will unpick the excess of negativity towards My Policeman the film in relation to this conference’s framing concern – who may write, tell or perform a particular story? – but also by reconnecting both novel and film with Roberts’ initial biographical inspiration for My Policeman, which the published text erases. Originally billed as a novel inspired by the novelist E. M. Forster’s enduring, and extraordinary, real-life relationship with the policeman Bob Buckingham and Bob’s wife May from the 1930s until Forster’s death in 1970, My Policeman’s published text – and the film – tell an almost wholly different story, in a different timeline, less fascinating than the facts that inspired it. This last point has not been lost on some of the film’s critics. None seem aware, however, that two stage bio-dramas exploring the Forster–Bob–May relationship already exist as scripts: Scott C. Sickles’ Nonsense and Beauty, staged briefly in the USA in 2016 after a 20-year genesis; and Charles Leipart’s A Kind of Marriage which at 2017 was in development, and received a rehearsed reading at the Donmar’s rehearsal rooms in London. with Alex Jennings as Forster, but has yet to be staged. In contrast with Roberts’ My Policeman, both scripts have yet to attract rights sales (or even a full theatrical staging), reminding us of the close, and particular, relationship between ‘the adaptation industry’ and corporate book publishing (Murray 2012).

  • dc.title: From costume romps to queer-cinema milestones: revisiting sexuality, gender, class (and more) through the lens of the ‘Long New Wave’ dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: The ‘post-New Wave’ films and trajectories of the key British New Wave directors in the period from 1963 onwards remain significantly underexplored terrain, particularly in terms of their potential relevance for rethinking and interrogating how we understand the ‘British New Wave’ itself and for the terms in which we might (or might not) conceptualise a ‘Long New Wave’. The individual directorial careers of Anderson, Reisz, Richardson and Schlesinger have, of course, yielded book-length studies; but the impulse in such work remains broadly auteurist, and often loyal to consensus framings of the four as pre-eminently directors of realism and social commitment. In contrast, my paper argues for the importance of two far-less-analysed areas of connection, commonality and development which emerge across the work of Richardson, Schlesinger and (in a smaller way) Reisz from the box-office triumph of Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963) onwards. First, Richardson’s successful foray into the costume romp was merely the first of several significant contributions by all three directors to a post-New Wave shake-up of the historical/costume film during the ‘pre-heritage film’ period (Monk 2021) across a spectrum of genres including ‘classic’ literary adaptation, revisionist British imperial history and twentieth-century retro. Second, the centrality of gay and bisexual directors (Anderson, Schlesinger, Richardson) and collaborations in shaping the British New Wave highlights a need to revisit the place of queerness, and the male as object of the gaze, within these filmmakers’ ‘long’ oeuvres – not least in Schlesinger’s groundbreaking direct contributions to a post-1967 queer cinema. My consideration of both strands highlights the importance of continuing director–star collaborations and, more speculatively, prompts the question of how attention to these directors’ period and queer films might inform a reassessment of the place of sexuality, gender, class and region in their earlier New Wave work.

  • dc.title: ‘London. My city. It was a monstrous place.’ Mapping and materialising Georgian London in City of Vice (Channel 4, 2008) dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: For five weeks in January to February 2008, up to 2.7million Channel 4 viewers each week (an 11% audience share for the 9pm peak post-watershed slot) were hooked by the historical drama series City of Vice set in 18th-century London – and particularly by its opening sequence, in which a birds-eye-view camera travelled along the Thames from east to west, passing the Tower of London, before sweeping inland at St Pauls and continuing along Fleet Street to zoom down onto Covent Garden market and nearby Bow Street. This opening sequence was accompanied by a sombre cello, and the equally sombre narratorial voice of actor Ian McDiarmid, cast as Henry Fielding, the celebrated 18th-century novelist and dramatist, but also (less widely known) appointed in around 1748 as Magistrate of Westminster and Middlesex: London’s chief magistrate. However, City of Vice – set, with precision, in 1753 – established the Georgian capital for its viewers not by manipulating aerial filmed footage of the real city, nor via use of exterior location shots – but by filming John Rocque’s 1746 Map of London (itself a cartographic feat which had taken 10 years to complete), then using CGI techniques to bring Rocque’s map to three-dimensional life. Both this opening sequence and the wider dramatic and materialisation strategies used in each episode propelled viewers through the drawn map(ped) streets, swooping aerially across the virtual Georgian city to land at precise real locations where the 3D map burns and fuses into the filmed live-action sequences of each week’s narrative. Produced by Touchpaper Television (a subsidiary of RDF Media) and Justin Hardy’s company Hardy & Sons for Channel 4, directed by Hardy and Dan Reed, and written by Clive Bradley and Peter Harness, with the social and women’s historian Hallie Rubenhold as its historical advisor, City of Vice’s subject was the struggle – spearheaded personally by Fielding with his younger brother John Fielding (Iain Glen) (also a magistrate: ‘the blind beak of Bow Street’, blind since youth) – to give London its tiny first police force, the Bow Street Runners. The Fieldings hoped, idealistically, to bring peace and order to the brutal, chaotic, crime-ridden capital: a place of grotesque inequality and constant danger, made ‘monstrous’ by ‘commerce and trade’, where ‘everything was available, at a price’ (Fielding in City of Vice, Episode 1). Moreover, City of Vice’s storylines, as well as its overall conceit and historical London topography, drew closely on primary historical sources and documents: the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (at a date when the Old Bailey Online project’s digitisation of these records for public access was still a work in progress), the Newgate Calendar and Henry Fielding’s own diaries/memoirs. In a further innovation, Channel 4 Education commissioned an historically accurate interactive game counterpart to the series, Bow Street Runner.

  • dc.title: From Costume Romps to Queer Milestones: Adaptation, Collaboration, Queerness and Modernism in the ‘Long New Wave’ of Richardson, Schlesinger and Reisz dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: The post-New Wave films and trajectories of the key British New Wave directors remain under-analysed terrain, both in terms of their potential relevance for interrogating how we understand the British New Wave itself and for the terms in which we might conceptualise a ‘Long’ New Wave. This essay departs from persisting auteurist approaches to consider the post-New-Wave oeuvres and careers of these directors collectively, in terms which foreground the importance of collaborations and networks rather than individual authorship and seek to decentre, denaturalise and potentially dislodge their pre-eminent association with Northern, British, social realism and its presumed legacies. I argue for the importance of a cluster of less-analysed areas of intersection and development which emerge across the eclectic filmmaking careers of Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger (and, to a lesser extent, Karel Reisz) in the immediate post-New Wave decade from the 1963 success of Richardson’s Tom Jones to the early 1970s. My discussion pivots on two commonalities: during this time, all three directors contributed significantly and plurally to innovations and advances in genre and representation across two areas distinct from British Northern working-class realism: historical/costume film genres, and queer representation. An approach which centres the (broadly defined) queer elements in these directors’ post-New-Wave oeuvres – intersecting at times with their equally undervalued contribution to ‘pre-heritage’ period cinema – reveals the ‘Long’ New Wave as substantially a cinema of adaptation, collaboration and queerness which encompassed important, near-forgotten, international projects as well as modernist influences and, in Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), a significant advance in realist queer representation. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.

  • dc.title: ‘But you know, there have been queer characters from the very first film’: Call Me by Your Name and the long shadow of James Ivory dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: The imprint of the veteran gay independent director James Ivory on Call Me by Your Name is fundamental: not merely as the 2017 film’s Academy Award-winning credited screenwriter, but via Ivory’s intimate involvement from 2007 onwards when the rights to André Aciman’s novel were first optioned. This chapter explores the contours of Ivory’s influence on Call Me by Your Name in cinematic–authorial and production–strategic terms to situate Call Me by Your Name’s remarkable 21st-century impact as LGBTQ+ cinema and same-sex romance in relation to Ivory’s longer and wider film oeuvre and to Merchant Ivory Productions’ collaborative, representational and promotional practices in their 44 years as a (widely and wilfully unacknowledged) queer filmmaking partnership. The chapter, firstly, offers a new, nuanced reading of Call Me by Your Name’s affinities with Ivory’s long-underrated affirmative gay film Maurice (1987), adapted from E. M. Forster’s posthumous 1971 novel – questioning viral social-media assertions about the ‘parallels’ between the two films which proliferated amid the rising 2017–2018 hype around the film – and, secondly, establishes Call Me by Your Name’s place and cinematic precursors within Ivory’s wider, less-known body of work beyond the ‘heritage film’ mode between 1963 and 2009, focusing particularly on Ivory’s films Slaves of New York (1988), A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998) and The City of Your Final Destination (2009). Thirdly, drawing on archive and wider primary sources, the chapter establishes the senses in which Call Me by Your Name’s exceptional crossover success owed a debt to the innovative promotional and release strategies which had been rehearsed three decades earlier in the release of Merchant Ivory’s Maurice.

Key research outputs

Recent publications

‘“But you know, there have been queer characters from the very first film”: Call Me by Your Name and the long shadow of James Ivory’. In Call Me by Your Name: Perspectives on the Film, eds Michael Williams & Edward Lamberti (Bristol: Intellect) 2024, pp.34-57.

‘From costume romps to queer milestones: adaptation, collaboration, queerness and modernism in the ‘Long New Wave’ of Richardson, Schlesinger and Reisz’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 2024, 21:3, pp.378-401.

 Newly anthologised:‘“Where I come from, we eat places like this for breakfast”: Aki Kaurismäki’s I Hired A Contract Killer (1990) as transnational representation of local London’. In Global London on Screen: Visitors, Cosmopolitans and Migratory Cinematic Visions of a Superdiverse City, eds Keith B. Wagner & Roland-François Lack (Manchester: MUP), 2023, pp.93-106.

‘“Such emotional sterility proves ideal for the role”: Hugh Grant’s proto-celebrity and its media (self-)construction around Maurice’, Celebrity Studies, 2023, 14:1, pp.18-33.

‘Forster and adaptation: across time, media and methodologies’, Polish Journal of English Studies, 2021, 7:2, pp.139-175. (International E. M. Forster Society: Forster 50 Special Issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of Forster’s death.)

‘EMI and the “pre-heritage” period film’, Journal of British Cinema & Television, 2021, 18:1, pp.50-76.

‘Maurice without ending: from Forster’s palimpsest to fan-text’. In Twenty-First-Century Readings of E. M. Forster’s ‘Maurice’, eds Emma Sutton & Tsung-Han Tsai (Liverpool: LUP), 2021, pp.229-251.

Newly-commissioned, research-led, feature-film audio commentary (full film + deleted scenes: total 3 hours) for the British Film Institute’s 30th-anniversary UK Blu-ray premiere edition of James Ivory’s landmark 1987 LGBTQ film Maurice, 2019. . ‘Monk’s assembly and explanation of such unused material fascinates … revelatory, a glimpse into the cinematic process itself’ –

Monograph 

Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK (Edinburgh: EUP), HB 2011 / PB 2012.

Shorter key publications

‘Heritage Film Audiences 2.0: period film audiences and online fan cultures', Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies , 2011, 8:3, pp.431-477.

‘Sexuality and heritage’, in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: British Film Institute) 2001, pp.6-11. Anthologised from original publication in Sight and Sound, Oct 1995, 5:10, pp.32-4.

‘Underbelly UK: the 1990s underclass film, masculinity and the ideologies of “New” Britain’, in British Cinema, Past and Present, eds Justine Ashby & Andrew Higson (London & New York: Routledge), 2000, pp.274-87.

‘The heritage film and gendered spectatorship’, CloseUp: The Electronic Journal of British Cinema, 1997, Issue 1. Archived in two parts:     

Claire Monk & Amy Sargeant (eds) British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film (London & New York: Routledge), 2002.

Research interests/expertise

British Film. Film Culture & Criticism. Audience & Reception Studies. Archival Research & Production Studies. Literature & Adaptations. James Ivory & Merchant Ivory Productions. Heritage Cinema, Period Film & Television, Historical Fictions, History in Media. UK Heritage Industries & Institutions. UK Arts, Film, Culture and Creative Industries & Institutions. Queer Literature, Cultural History & Cinema. Queer Archives & Production Studies. Class, Gender & Sexuality in Film & Media. Popular Reception, Fandom, Fan Productivity, Fanworks & Fan-Adaptations. Digital/Participatory/Social Media.  E. M. Forster, Queer Forster, Forster & Adaptation. Punk & Post-Punk. London Histories, London on Film, London Media. Women’s Cinema/Women Filmmakers. Black British Cinema. Independent Film. Third Cinemas. Community Film, Video, Photography & Archives.

Areas of teaching

Post-1960 and Contemporary British Cinema, World Cinemas, The Past on Film, Foundation of Film Studies (Theory, Criticism & History).

Qualifications

  • PhD, School of Arts, Middlesex University, UK, 2007. (Full-time scholarship in Middlebrow Culture, Audiences and Taste, supervised by Professor Francis Mulhern.) 
  • PGCert in Teaching and Learning in Adult & Higher Education, Birkbeck, University of London, UK, 1998.
  • MA with Distinction in Cinema and Television Studies, British Film Institute in association with the University of London, 1994.
  • BA Hons 2:1 in Philosophy, Politics & Economics (PPE), Balliol College, University of Oxford, UK, 1986. (Williams Exhibitioner. Personal tutor Alan Montefiore.)

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ taught

  • Currently: FILM1102 Foundations of Film Studies, FILM3113 British Cinema, FILM3114 Film Studies Dissertation Tutor.
  • Formerly: FILM2007 & FILM2401 World Cinemas, FILM2502 Contemporary British Cinema, FILM3404 The Past on Film – all developed and led as new modules.
  • PhD & MPhil supervisions.
  • MRes (MA by Research) supervisions.

Honours and awards

 

& 2012: Invited contributor in two successive decades to  to Sight & Sound magazine’s famous once-a-decade poll of leading critics and filmmakers worldwide, considered the most influential (and certainly most-debated) of its kind. (In 2012, one of only 26 UK academics – and 9 UK female academics – then below Professor level invited to contribute.)

2017–: Elected to the AHRC (UKRI) Peer Review College.

2016–: Member by invitation of the International E. M. Forster Society.

2016: Cinema & Television History (CATH) Research Centre, team winner of the ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ OSCAR Award for Outstanding Contribution to Research Excellence.

Membership of professional associations and societies

  • AAS (International Association of Adaptation Studies), 2009–
  • ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Copyright Society), 2011–
  • BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies), 2012–
  • Fan Studies Network, 2012–
  • International E. M. Forster Society (by invitation), 2016–
  • MeCCSA (Media, Cultural and Communication Studies Association), 2006–

Conference attendance

Conferences and panels as organiser

Peer-review and hosting committee: Console-ing Passions: 21st International Conference on Television, Video, Audio, New Media and Feminism, ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ, 23-25 Jun 2013.

Panel organiser: ‘E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1913/1971) and 25 years of James Ivory’s Maurice (1987): adaptation(s), authorship(s) and reappraisal(s)’, 7th Annual Conference of the Association of Adaptation Studies (AAS): Visible and Invisible Authorships, University of York, UK, 27-28 Sep 2012.

Conference instigator and joint organiser: Adapting Historical Narratives Conference, ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Centre for Adaptations, 28 Feb 2012.

Public event instigator/curator/organiser: African Classic Film Screening and Discussion: Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Badou Boy (1970), with panellists Professor Patrick Williams (Nottingham Trent University) and Lizelle Bisschoff (Director, Africa in Motion Film Festival), ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Cultural Exchanges Festival 2010, 2 Mar 2010.

 

As keynote or other invited speaker:

‘Messing with masculinities: Post-Thatcher British cinema’s other men since the 1990s’, Film After Thatcher: Gender and Sexuality in post-1990 British Cinema, Liverpool Hope University, UK, 2 Jul 2014. (Keynote)

‘“The shadow of this time”: tradition and history, alchemy and multiplicity in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)’, Early Modern Jarman Symposium, King’s College London, UK, 1 Feb 2014. Part of the year-long Jarman 2014 commemoration. (Invited speaker)

‘Heritage films and their audiences: fan perspectives and practices and why they matter’, Screening European Heritage, University of Leeds, 12-13 Sep 2013. An outcome of the AHRC-funded Screening European Heritage scoping study and network. (Keynote)

‘From Lypton Village to London Goth: Virgin Prunes in England, c. 1982-4’, A Special Relationship? Irish Popular Music in Britain, Northumbia University, UK, in conjunction with the University of Ulster Centre for Media Research, 27-8 June 2012 (Invited plenary speaker)

‘Web 2.0 fandom and James Ivory’s/E. M. Forster’s Maurice (UK, 1987) – or: Tumblr, LiveJournal and YouTube, the life of texts and the redundancy of “heritage-film” criticism’, Pursuing the Trivial: Investigations into Popular Culture, University of Vienna/Vienna University of Applied Arts, Austria, 1-2 Jun 2012. (Keynote, postgraduate conference)

‘Ken Loach in England: work and the working classes under neo-liberalism and globalisation’, From 'Hidden Agenda' to the 'Free World': The political films of Ken Loach, study day, BFI (British Film Institute) Southbank, London, in association with Royal Holloway University of London, 1 Oct 2011. (Invited speaker, directly after Channel 4 News / formerly BBC Newsnight Economics Editor Paul Mason)

‘Majesty/alchemy/anarchy: fashionable and unfashionable queens in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)’, Fashionable Queens: Body, Power, Gender Symposium, Institute for English Studies & Institute for Sociology, University of Vienna, Austria, 3-4 Dec 2010. (Paper delivered in absentia due to flight cancellations.) 

Keynote speaker plus film introduction to Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (UK, 2009), Radical British Screens symposium, University of the West of England (UWE) & Screen South-West Research Network, UWE/Arnolfini Arts Centre, Bristol, UK, 3 Sep 2010. 

‘Not represented: on absences, specificities and post-punk music cultures in post-2000 British film’, British Film 2000–2010: Crossing Borders, Transferring Cultures, Centre for Intercultural Studies/Faculty of Translation, Sprache und Kultur, Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, 18-21 Feb 2010. (Invited plenary speaker)

‘“Not new wave. It’s inspired by punk.” The post-punk female in British film: Hazel O’Connor and Breaking Glass’, Post-Punk Performance: The Alternative 80s in Britain, School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, UK, 9 Sep 2009. (Invited speaker)

‘Beyond the heritage debate: investigating period-film audiences’, Representation. Period: A Study Day in Representations, History and Nostalgia in Period Film and Television, University of Sussex, UK, 15 Sep 2005. Keynote speaker.

Consultancy work

, produced by Simon Elmes and presented by Laurence Scott for BBC Radio 3, broadcast 6 Apr 2014. Expert contributor and sole academic interviewee (alongside novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, actress Helena Bonham-Carter and others) for this programme on the films and record-breaking filmmaking and personal partnership of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter and novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. 

: consulted as expert source for a feature on BBC3’s cult series Monkey Dust (2003-5): ‘’, by Dan Wilkinson, 20 May 2015. My 2007 refereed journal article ‘London and contemporary Britain in Monkey Dust’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 4:2, was the first (and remains virtually the only) academic appraisal of Monkey Dust.

AHRC Screening European Heritage project, University of Leeds: interviewed as an invited leading expert source, , published 25 Jul 2013.

, Somethin’ Else Productions for BBC Radio 4, presented by novelist Naomi Alderman, broadcast 26 Nov 2012. Consulted during the programme’s development by Somethin’ Else’s Head of Features Russell Finch.

Invited contributor in 2022 & 2012 to Sight & Sound magazine’s world-famous, once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time Poll of leading critics and filmmakers worldwide, considered one of the most influential of its kind.

‘Cameras in pursuit of the unfilmable’ by Andrew Johnson, , 6 Jun 2010, pp.24-25. Consulted as expert and quoted in feature on the adaptation of ‘unfilmable’ novels.

Subsstantial contribution to project research, authorship of lead DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay, and media coverage for the British Film Institute’s Flipside DVD/Blu-ray release of three ‘lost’ films by the iconoclastic, radical, feminist British filmmaker, actor and theatre-maker 1937–2024), Jul-Aug 2009. ‘Always too early’’: DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay for (1967), released Jul 2009. ‘Long live the ghosts’: feature for Sight & Sound, Aug 2009.

Current research students

 

PhD/MPhil Current research students
Else Thompson (UK), PhD, British Female Film Collectives: From the Workshop Movement to Present-Day Film Groups, Festivals Related Activism. 1st supervisor.

PhD/MPhil research students: completions

Caroline Langhorst (Germany/UK), PhD. ‘Let Us Compare Mythologies’ or Raising Hell?:  Rebellious Actors in 1960s British Cinema, 2023. 2nd supervisor.

Anthony S. Peppiatt (UK), PhD (AHRC Midlands3Cities Scholarship – co-supervision with Professor Martin O’Shaughnessy, NTU). The Children’s Film Foundation: An Investigation into the Decline and Fall of a Unique British Institution, 2021. 2nd supervisor.

Laura Fryer (UK), PhD (AHRC Midlands3Cities Scholarship). The Adapted Screenplays of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 2020. 2nd supervisor.

Françoise Poos (Luxembourg), PhD. The Making of a National Audio-Visual Archive: The CNA [Centre nationale de l’audiovisuel, Luxembourg] and the Hidden Images Exhibition, 2016. 2nd supervisor.

Caitlin Shaw (Canada), PhD. Remediating the Eighties: Nostalgia and Retro in British Screen Fiction from 2005 to 2011, 2015. 1st supervisor.

Takako Seino (Japan), MPhil. ,Realism and Representations of the Working Class in Contemporary British Cinema, 2011. De facto 1st supervisor.

Masters by Research: completions:

Andrew Johnstone (UK), MA Independent Study. Documentary Film in International Development, 2013.

Llewella Burton (UK), MA Independent Study. Interpretation as Practice: Chasing the Post-Heritage Dream, 2012.

Professional esteem indicators

Member of the AHRC (UKRI) Peer Review College: Appointed 2017, currently serving my third term as a reviewer to 2027.

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Site Director for the AHRC Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (comprising eight leading Midlands universities), 2019/20–2022/23.

Journal Editorial Board Member: Journal of British Cinema & Television (Edinburgh University Press) since 2012.

Referee for peer-reviewed journals including Adaptation (Oxford University Press), Canadian Journal of Film Studies (Film Studies Association of Canada/Concordia University), Consumption, Markets and Culture (Taylor & Francis), Critical Studies in Media Communication (University of Illinois), European Journal of Cultural Studies (Sage), European Journal of Life Writing (University of Groningen Press), Film–Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press), Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance (Intellect), Journal of British Cinema & Television (Edinburgh University Press), The Minnesota Review (Duke University Press), Polish Journal of English Studies (Polish Association for the Study of English), Punk & Post-Punk (Intellect), Rethinking History (Taylor & Francis).

Peer review for publishers including Amsterdam University Press, Bloomsbury Academic (USA & UK), BFI Publishing (British Film Institute– Palgrave, Bloomsbury), Manchester University Press, McGill–Queens University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge.

Case studies

• Newly commissioned feature-film audio commentary (full film + deleted scenes: total 3 hours) for the British Film Institute’s 30th-anniversary re-release and , 2019. My commentary was informed by the unique research sources in the James Ivory Papers at the University of Oregon. To date, I am the only scholar to have drawn on Ivory’s Maurice production files in my work. My commentary was singled out for acclaim in The Arts Desk’s review of the BFI’s Blu-ray release: 

‘Monk’s assembly and explanation of such unused material fascinates … revelatory, a glimpse into the cinematic process itself’ – 

• In addition, for Maurice‘s 30th-anniversary 4K digital restoration and its Blu-ray premiere release in both the US and UK, I conducted a substantial new interview with Maurice’s star James Wilby (1987 Venice Film Festival Best Actor, jointly with second-billed co-star Hugh Grant), again drawing on my unique reseach in Ivory’s Maurice production archive, which was published in the Blu-ray booklet for both editions (Cohen Media Group, 2017, USA; BFI, 2019, UK).

• , produced by Simon Elmes and presented by Laurence Scott for BBC Radio 3, first broadcast 2014 and . Expert contributor and sole academic interviewee (alongside novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, actress Helena Bonham-Carter and others) for this programme on the films and record-breaking filmmaking and personal partnership of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter and novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

• AHRC  project, University of Leeds: invited expert source/witness for a scoping study that reported to European policymakers and the UK House of Lords, including a , 2013.

• AHRC project and conference Channel Four and British Film Culture, University of Portsmouth/British Universities’ Film & Video Council (BUFVC) at BFI Southbank, London, 1-2 Nov 2012. Plenary paper, ‘Forgotten histories? Film on Four and British retro and heritage films of the 1980s’, was a featured conference audio recording on the . 

• ‘Eyre conditioning’: invited feature on the new big-screen Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011; starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender) for Sight & Sound, Oct 2011.

• Invited speaker, From 'Hidden Agenda' to the 'Free World': The political films of Ken Loach study day held at BFI (British Film Institute) Southbank, London, 1 Oct 2011, speaking directly after Channel 4 News / formerly BBC Newsnight Economics Editor Paul Mason.

• Contribution to project research, authorship of lead DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay, and media coverage for the British Film Institute’s Flipside DVD/Blu-ray release of three ‘lost’ films by the iconoclastic British femiinst filmmaker, actor and theatre-maker  (1927–1982) and her partner  (1937–2024), Jul-Aug 2009. ‘Always too early’’: DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay for (1967), released Jul 2009. ‘Long live the ghosts’: feature for Sight & Sound, Aug 2009. 

• Invited talks at world-class venues including BFI Southbank (London) and the Arnolfini (Bristol). Talks at local venues engaging local communities and young people have included National Trust’s Sutton House (London Borugh of Hackney), Barking & Dagenham Malthouse Monthly Film Club (a cultural regeneration initiative in the London Borugh of Barking & Dagenham), and Phoenix Cinema & Digital Media Centre (Leicester).

Monk: Heritage Film Audiences book cover

Monk & Sargeant: British Historical Cinema book cover