Professor Linda Ruth Williams
Professor in Film Studies
3284
01392 723284
Overview
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I am Professor of Film at Exeter University. Most of my teaching work is on post-classical American cinema, British cinema and classical Hollywood. I also teach film MA students and supervise a number of PhDs. I have written five books and edited or co-edited several others, including The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (the first book on this important post-classical genre), Contemporary American Cinema (co-edited with Michael Hammond), as well as books on psychoanalytic critical and cultural theory, and on D. H. Lawrence, feminism and visual culture. I have always worked on gender and culture, and have a longstanding interest in representations of sexuality and the history of censorship and classification. I am just completing a study of children and childhood in Spielberg entitled Steven Spielberg's Children. With my research partner at Southampton University, Dr Shelley Cobb, I worked on major new research project on contemporary women filmmakers, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, entitled Calling the Shots: women and contemporary film culture in the UK, 2000-2015. More widely, I work on women's work in the UK screen sector, and also have a strong interest in how this builds new film histories, including through archives. I have been involved in film exhibition and curation for a decade or so, as co-curator of the annual Shetland Film Festival Screenplay, from which sprang A Hansel of Film - a round-the-UK tour of short films which was part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.
Publications
Copyright Notice: Any articles made available for download are for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the copyright holder.
| 2023 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 |
2023
- Cobb S, Williams LR. (2023) Caring, Collaboration, Confidence and Constraint in the Working Lives of Older Women Filmmakers in the UK, Women, Ageing and the Screen Industries, Springer Nature, 61-76, DOI:10.1007/978-3-031-18385-0_4.
2020
- Cobb S, Williams LR. (2020) Gender Equality in British Film-making: Research, Targets, Change, Women in the International Film Industry, Springer Nature, 97-110, DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-39070-9_6.
2019
- Williams L, Cobb S. (2019) Histories of now: Listening to women in British film, Women's History Review, pages 890-902, DOI:10.1080/09612025.2019.1703542.
2018
- Williams L. (2018) The Iron Lady: Politics and/in performance, Rule, Britannia ! Biopics and British National Identity, SUNY.
2017
- Williams LR. (2017) The shock ofThe Red Shoes, New Review of Film and Television Studies, volume 15, no. 1, pages 9-23, DOI:10.1080/17400309.2016.1274524. [PDF]
- Williams L. (2017) 'Who am I, David?': Motherhood in Spielberg's Dramas of Family Dysfunction, A Companion to Steven Spielberg, John Wiley & Sons, 243-257.
2016
- Williams L. (2016) Shortbus: Smart Cinema and Sexual Utopia, Sex and Storytelling in Modern Cinema Explicit Sex, Performance and Cinematic Technique, I. B. Tauris, 95-117.
2015
- Williams L. (2015) George Cukor’s Theatrical Feminism, George Cukor: Hollywood Master, Edinburgh University Press, 139-155, DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748693566.003.0010.
- Williams L. (2015) Jane Fonda, Power Nuptials and the Project of Ageing, First Comes Love Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 295-312.
Biography
I grew up in Bristol, and studied at Sussex University: my first degree was in English; I followed this with an MA in Critical Theory from Sussex, and then a PhD on Lawrence, Nietzsche, Freud and feminism, before I moved fully into film teaching and research in the early 1990s. Before I came to Exeter in 2017 I was Professor of Film in the English Department at Southampton University, and before that I taught at Liverpool University and at Manchester University.
My brother and I were the first our family to go to university. Widening access to Higher Education has been important to me since the start of my career.