Speakers

Peter Adams

Peter Adams is a PhD student at Cambridge University. His research examines the relationship between music, sound, and screen media, sitting at the intersection of musicology and film studies. Specifically, his thesis focuses on the selective omission of diegetic sound in contemporary cinema, television, and gaming, and the development of a media aesthetic known as “neo-silence”. The project includes detailed case studies of paradigmatic neo-silent content, and also considers the wider historical, theoretical, and practical foundations of on-screen silence, from its early cinematic origins (as an unavoidable limitation of a nascent medium) to its present-day role as a conscious aesthetic tool. Before Cambridge, Peter completed a Masters in Musicology at Oxford University, where his research also centred on music and the moving image.

Anushtrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal

Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal is a second-year doctoral student looking at nineteenth and twentieth century British visual culture in educational settings, at the Department of Film Studies, University of St Andrews. He currently studies the use of film in educational contexts in Britain during the Early Cinema period. He has previously worked on the cartographic implications of the films made by the British Colonial Film Unit, and also the cinematic defiance of Hegel’s idea of History in the work of the Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety. He previously holds an MLitt in Film Studies from St Andrews and an MA in Global Cinemas as the Transcultural from the SOAS, University of London.

Diego Alonso

Diego Alonso (Logroño, Spain, 1980) studied Musicology at the Complutensian University in Madrid with two excellent academic performance awards. He received his PhD in 2015 from La Rioja University with a thesis on Arnold Schoenberg’s influence on the music and thought of Roberto Gerhard. He has been a visiting scholar at Humboldt University in Berlin (2010 and 2013), at the University of Cambridge (2011) and at Goldsmiths, University of London (2012). In 2014 he was awarded a research scholarship by the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung (Berlin) for the study of the reception of Schoenberg’s music in Catalonia. Currently, he works at Humboldt University as a postdoc researcher in the DFG-funded project ‘Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain’. He is founder and leader (Sprecher) of the study group “Deutsch-Ibero-Amerikanische Musikbeziehungen” of the German Musicological Society. He has published in leading musicology journals such as Acta musicologica, Twentieth-Century Music, Music Analysis, Journal of War and Culture Studies and Musicologica Austriaca (Best Paper Award 2019).

Emilio Audissino

A film and media scholar with a film-maker’s background, Emilio Audissino is Senior Lecturer at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He specialises in audiovisual analysis, screenwriting, audiovisual style and technique, comedy, horror, and sound and music in film. He is the author of the monograph John Williams's Film Music (2014, 2nd edition in 2021), the first book-length study in English on the composer. His book Film/Music Analysis. A Film Studies Approach (2017) concerns a method to analyse music in films that blends Neoformalism and Gestalt Psychology.

Andrea Avidad

Andrea Avidad is a Ph.D. student in the Cinema Studies program at New York University. She is a recipient of the Corrigan Fellowship award. She teaches Film Studies at City University of New York. She holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School, where she received a Distinguished Thesis Award for her dissertation on Derek Jarman’s work, in particular, on his use of sound and voice. Her articles have been published in journals such as Film-Philosophy and Soapbox: Journal for Cultural Analysis (published by the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis). She is also a contributor in the edited collection Sound Affects (forthcoming).

Anika Babel

Anika Babel is a doctoral candidate at the University College Dublin School of Music. Her project The Classical Prerogative and Western Art Music: Representations of the Piano in Contemporary Mainstream Film examines the mediatory relationship between the ‘reel’ and the ‘real’—with particular attention paid to issues surrounding class, gender, and race. Anika is the founding president of the Dublin Musicology Collective for Graduate Welfare and co-editor of the peer-reviewed student journal The Musicology Review. She has been the recipient of the Roche Continents award and the Kodály Society of Ireland scholarship.

Marie Bennett

Marie Josephine Bennett (M.Mus) is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Winchester. Her research focuses on critical readings of queer performance in a number of mainstream post-Production Code Hollywood film musicals released between 1970 and 1980. Her major areas of interest and research are Hollywood film musicals, music in films, queer studies, celebrity studies, popular music of the 1960s-1980s, and the Eurovision Song Contest. Publications include ‘Inviting Other Hearings’ in Dago Schelin and Luciana Martha Silveira (eds.), Cinema Invites Other Gazes (2016) and ‘Mercury’s Message to Go On With the Show’ in Marie Josephine Bennett and David Gracon (eds.) Music and Death: Interdisciplinary Readings and Perspectives (2019).

Amrita Biswas

Amrita Biswas is a PhD candidate in the ‘Configurations of Film’ research collective at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She completed her M.Phil. in cinema studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi. She received her BA from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, in English, and then pursued her post-graduation in film studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her research interests include post-partition trauma in the films of Ritwik Ghatak as well as media infrastructures of alternative and popular Bengali cinema. Her published work focuses on the Super-8 film movement and the culture of cinephilia in Bengal. She was awarded the Erasmus Plus fellowship for conducting research in the department of Cultural Anthropology at Georg-August University, Göttingen.

David Brown

Dr David W R Brown is an Assistant Lecturer in the Centre for Music and Audio Technology at the University of Kent. His recently examined doctoral thesis in Film Studies analyses how cultural differences shape the representation of faces and facial expression in narrative cinema. Beyond his research on fiction films and his interest in sound, David also works on documentary filmmaking and has published on narrative emotions in contemporary television.

Jacob Browne

Jacob Browne is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews, under the Doctoral Training Programme of SGSAH. He is also currently co-editor-in-chief of the peer reviewed cinema journal Frames. Jacob completed his MPhil in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge, and his BA in Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Oxford. His research interests include silent cinema, sensual studies, medical anthropology and the phenomenology of madness and hallucinations.

Emilia Czatkowska

Emilia Czątkowska is a CHASE-funded PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Kent, where she is in the process of writing a thesis on cinematic representation of the animal perspective. Among her research interests are human animal studies, film theory and analysis, sound theory, and visual culture.

Julia Durand

Júlia Durand is a musicology PhD student at the NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal. She is a member of the Center of Sociology and Musical Aesthetics (CESEM) and takes part in the research activities of its Group for Studies in Sociology of Music (SociMus) and Group for Advanced Studies in Music and Cyberculture (CysMus). In addition to several papers on music and audiovisuals presented at international conferences such as Music and the Moving Image, her research has been published as chapters in edited volumes and in the journals Music, Sound and the Moving Image and Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia. Her PhD is funded with an FCT grant (SFRH/BD/132254/2017), and it focuses on the production and use of library music in online videos.

Lara Ehrenfried

I completed a PhD in English and Visual Culture at Durham University. To date, my articles and reviews have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Modernist Cultures, and The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945. My research focuses on the crossovers between early sound film, synchronized sound technology, and twentieth-century literature in Britain and I am currently writing a monograph on this topic.

Angela English

Angela English was awarded her PhD from Birmingham City University in July 2020 for a research project entitled ‘On the periphery: archive film, public history and memory in places and spaces on the borders of London’. Her research focuses on how film archives might play a role in public history practice and audience engagement. She previously had a long career working in arts and education, the film archive sector and as a lecturer in adult and further education. From 2000-2003 she was Head of the Education Projects Development Unit at the British Film Institute, working at the National Film Theatre. From 2006-2015 she was the Research and Development Officer for the London Screen Study Collection at Birkbeck College, University of London where she was also an Associate Lecturer in Film and Media.

Camila Figueiredo

Camila Figueiredo holds a Doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, with a mobility period at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. She has a Master’s degree in English Literature, subarea Literature, Other Arts and Media. Her research focuses on Intermedial studies, with an emphasis on transmedia and adaptations involving cinema, literature, graphic novels, TV series, and telenovelas. She currently works at UFMG Publishing House (Editora UFMG), as Editorial Manager and Vice-Director.

Maria Fuchs

Maria Fuchs is a postdoctoral scholar at the Center of Popular Culture and Music at the Albert- Ludwigs-University Freiburg and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, leading the FWF project "Soundscapes of 'Heimat': Mapping Musical Signatures in Heimatfilme and Bergfilme (1930-1970)". She was a lecturer at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and actually teaches at the Universität der Künste Berlin.

For her Ph.D. she obtained a doctoral fellowship from the University of Vienna and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). Her research focuses on popular and cross-media phenomena of music of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially on film music. She is the author of Stummfilmmusik. Theorie und Praxis im ‚Allgemeinen Handbuch der Film-Musik’ (1927), Marburg 2016. Most recently: “Hermann Kretzschmar’s forgotten heirs: ‘Silent’ Film Music As Applied Musical Hermeneutics”, in: Gillian Anderson/ Ron Sadoff (ed.), Music and the Moving Image, 12 (3), 2019, 3–24.

Michael Goddard

Dr Michael N. Goddard, is Director of Research Development in Transmedia, Music and Performance in CREAM at the University of Westminster. He has published widely on international cinema and audiovisual culture as well as cultural and media theory. In media archaeology, his most significant contribution is the monograph, Guerrilla Networks (2018), which was published by Amsterdam University Press. His previous book, Impossible Cartographies (2013) was on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz. He has also been doing research on the fringes of popular music focusing on groups such as The Fall, Throbbing Gristle and Laibach and culminating in editing two books on noise, Reverberations (2012) and Resonances (2013). He is currently working on a book on the British post-industrial group Coil.

Jonathan Godsall

Jonathan Godsall is a musicologist with overlapping research interests in music and screen media, musical borrowing and intertextuality, and musical reception. He is the author of Reeled In: Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film (2019), as well as of articles and chapters in journals and books including The Soundtrack (2011, 2014), Contemporary Film Music (2017), and The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening (2021). He also performs as a drummer and percussionist in various contexts. Since completing his PhD at the University of Bristol (2014), Jonathan has conducted his research independently alongside teaching positions at eight UK universities.

Steve Halfyard

Dr Janet K. Halfyard (commonly known as Steve) is Head of BMus programmes at RCS. Her research is mainly focused on music in horror/ supernatural and superhero film and TV, and publications include Danny Elfman’s Batman: a film score guide(Scarecrow Press, 2004), Sounds of Fear and Wonder: Music in Cult TV (IB Tauris, 2016) and the edited collections Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Ashgate, 2010) and Music in Fantasy Cinema (Equinox, 2012). Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was awarded the Whedon Studies Association’s ‘Long Mr Pointy’ for the best book in Whedon Studies in 2010, and the chapter on music in Buffy in Sounds of Fear and Wonder won the ‘Short Mr Pointy’ for 2016.

Toby Huelin

Toby Huelin is a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, investigating the use of library music in contemporary television production. His research is fully-funded by the AHRC via the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH). Toby is the author of forthcoming journal articles on the role of music programming on BBC Four (Critical Studies in Television, 2022) and musical representations of Donald Trump in library music catalogues (European Journal of American Culture, 2022, co-authored with Júlia Durand), and has presented at conferences including Music and the Moving Image (NYU) and Hidden Figures of Screen Music and Sound (RHUL). Toby is also a media composer: his music has been broadcast on Emmy Award-winning television (United Shades of America, CNN) and is regularly heard across primetime entertainment programming (Masterchef, The One Show, Panorama etc.). Toby is the founder of the British Audio-Visual Research Network’s Virtual Colloquia, an ongoing series of academic lectures and industry interviews.

Katy Jayasuriya

Katy Jayasuriya is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. She has been funded by the Frederick Loewe Foundation to research and prepare a critical edition of Lerner and Loewe's Broadway musical Camelot (1960) alongside her doctoral thesis on this musical. She completed an MA in Musicology in 2017 for which she wrote her dissertation on "patriarchal utopias" in the film musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).

Andrew Knight-Hill

Andrew Knight-Hill (1986) is a composer of electroacoustic music, specialising in studio composed works both acousmatic (purely sound based) and audio-visual. His works have been performed extensively across the UK, in Europe and the US. Including performances at Fyklingen, Stockholm; GRM, Paris; ZKM, Karlsruhe; New York Public Library, New York; London Contemporary Music Festival, London; San Francisco Tape Music Festival, San Francisco; Cinesonika, Vancouver; Festival Punto de Encuentro, Valencia; and many more.

His works are composed with materials captured from the human and natural world, seeking to explore the beauty in everyday objects. He is particularly interested in how these materials are interpreted by audiences, and how these interpretations relate to our experience of the real and the virtual.

He is Senior Lecturer in Sound Design and Music Technology at the University of Greenwich and programme leader of Sound Design BA.

Edward Larkey

Edward Larkey is Professor of German Studies and Intercultural Communication (Emeritus) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA. He is the author of Pungent Sounds: Constructing Identity with Popular Music in Austria (Peter Lang: 1993), and published (in German) Rotes Rockradio: Populäre Musik und die Kommerzialisierung des DDR-Rundfunks [Red Rock Radio: Popular Music and the Commercialization of GDR-Broadcasting] (LIT-Verlag: 2007). He is currently involved in a digital humanities project which utilizes computer annotation and graphing software combined with multimodal analysis to derive a viable critical methodology for cross-culturally comparing different versions of television formats. He has published or co-authored two articles in the online journal VIEW and is awaiting the publication of his latest article in a forthcoming special issue on audiovisual texts in the Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Matt Lawson

Matt Lawson is Senior Lecturer in Music at Oxford Brookes University, UK, where he has worked since 2017. Primarily a film and television music specialist, Matt completed his PhD at Edge Hill University in 2017, with a thesis focussing on the music used in German depictions of the Holocaust on screen. This followed on from an undergraduate BMus (Hons) degree from the University of Huddersfield, and an MA in Music with Distinction from the University of York. Matt is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, having completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education in 2015. He is co-author of the book, 100 Greatest Film Scores (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), and has appeared on BBC Radio across England to discuss his passion for film music.

Julin Lee

Julin Lee is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. After graduating from the University of Cambridge in 2014 where she studied Chemical Engineering via Natural Sciences, she has actively cultivated her research interests at the intersection of science, technology and music. She has published on Oskar Sala, the Trautonium and Sala’s soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and also presented her research at international conferences and workshops in Istanbul, Berlin, Mataró, Maynooth and Munich. Currently as Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, her research focuses on the impact of synthesizers on Hollywood film scores.

Laura Lux

Laura Lux is a PhD candidate in the German department at King’s College London with second supervision in the Film studies department. Her PhD research analyses the early films, media practices and texts of the German essay filmmaker Harun Farocki in the context of the West German 1968 student movement and the politics around technology and science. Previously, she worked in an assisting role at the film retrospective “The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and the two-day workshop “Uncertainty, Turbulence and Moving Image Archives” in 2019. She is Danièle Huillet” and in currently the administrator of the Centre of Digital Culture in the Arts and Humanities Research Institute at King’s.

Tarun Madupu

I am a sound designer, composer and filmmaker. After graduating from Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music with a Diploma in Audio Engineering and Music Technology, I went on to get my Masters degree from Kino Eyes - The European Movie Masters. I am currently perusing my PhD in the field of sound and cinema and am an integrated researcher at CICANT. Through my education and experience in film and music, I have equipped himself with an understanding of the mechanisms that weave film, narratives, and soundscapes together into something powerful. With my unique perspective of film, owing to my time working both in India and Europe, I hope to contribute meaningfully to the art of filmmaking and it’s academic canon.

Leslie McMurtry

Leslie McMurtry is a Lecturer in Radio Studies at the University of Salford. She recently published a book on radio and audio drama, Revolution in the Echo Chamber: Audio Drama’s Past, Present, and Future. She has written about sound design in film and television for Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog and gave a guest talk at the University of Chester in 2020 on sound in Star Wars.

James Peter Moffatt

James Peter Moffatt is a Composer, Musician, Record Producer & Academic who has scored numerous international films including BAFTA shortlisted ‘We Are Dancers’ and the multi-award-winning ‘House of Cardin’. His work has been broadcast and recognised by the BBC, Venice Film Festival, Rolling Stone Magazine, Vice and The Hollywood Reporter, collaborating with Academy-Award and BAFTA winning personnel. James is also the recipient of AHRC funding, pursuing a PhD in Film Music and Streaming Platforms at the University of Liverpool, and is a Senior Lecturer in Film Music at Leeds Conservatoire.

Melissa Morton

Melissa is a PhD student in Music at the University of Edinburgh. Her project investigates the branding of UK television channels through television idents and is fully funded by the ‘Edinburgh College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Research Award’. She holds a First Class degree in Music and a Master’s degree (MSt Musicology, Distinction), both from the University of Oxford.

Sarah Moynihan

Sarah is a College Lecturer at Magdalen College, University of Oxford; an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, and trustee of the Society for Music Analysis. After completing an MA in Composition for Screen at Bristol University, she went on to study for a PhD in Music History and Analysis at Royal Holloway. Her doctoral thesis examined the history of analytical approaches to Jean Sibelius’s music to reformulate the accepted view of the composer as an early modernist. Her research focuses on the enduring legacy of early twentieth-century receptions of Sibelius’s music in the Britain and the US.

Naomi Orrell

Naomi Orrell (she/her) is a musician and researcher based in the UK. She studied for an undergraduate degree in Music at the University of Oxford, followed by a masters in Historical Performance at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her most recent research has been focused on trans identity construction in music and investigating the experiences of trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming Classical musicians. Part of her masters thesis is to be published as part of a volume of inequalities in Classical Music by Oxford University Press in late 2022. She is currently applying for PhD programmes, looking at the construction of trans identities in pop music. Her academic interests are queer/trans musicology, pop music studies, philosophy of the body and historical performance research.

Holly Rogers and Heather Britton

Holly Rogers is Reader in Music and Director of the MA Music (Audiovisual Cultures) at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (OUP 2013) and Twentieth Century Musics (CUP 2020), editor of Music and Sound in Documentary Film (Routledge 2014) and co-editor of The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (OUP 2017),Transmedia Directors (Bloomsbury 2019), Cybermedia(Bloomsbury 2021), Music and YouTube (Bloomsbury 2022) and Audiovisual Remediations (Bloomsbury 2023). Holly is a founding editor of the Bloomsbury Book Series New Approaches to Music, Sound and Media, and co-edits the Journal Sonic Scope: New Approaches to Audiovisual Culture.

Heather Britton is a multi-instrumentalist and audiovisual composer, working across multiple mediums and genres. She completed her MA in Creative Practice at Goldsmiths, where she produced her first audiovisual album and a documentary film exploring the effects of ageing on the identity of a nonagenarian musician. Current projects include a political audio piece for the BBC, ICA and NTS radio and composing music for film and TV. Her extended research interests and practice covers a broad range of topics from sound design to video editing, with a special interest in synchresis and incongruousness in audiovisual composition, as well as being a cinephile with a passion for experimental filmmaking. She is on the editorial board for the journal Sonic Scope and lives in Brighton with her pet rabbit, Zissou.

Jamie Sexton

Jamie Sexton is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Northumbria University. His research interests are mainly focused around cult cinema, independent cinema, as well as music and cinema. Forthcoming publications include Freak Scenes: Indie Music Cultures and American Independent Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and British Musical Hauntology (Reaktion, 2022). He is also the Principal Investigator of a recently funded Leverhulme Research Project, titled ‘Anonymous Creativity: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s.’

Eleanor Smith

Dr Eleanor Smith has recently finished her doctorate at the University of Huddersfield with a focus on film music studies combined with gender and identity. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Music, Madness & Memory: Victorian Constructions of Madness and Musical Horror Tropes in Contemporary Film and Television’, explored the stigma attached to mental illness (particularly madness) by exploring how the soundtrack and the visual enhances and enforces this representation in horror film and television. Her case studies followed three-character portrayals of madness exploring the musical perimeters that enhance these characters. Eleanor also taught part time at the University of Huddersfield for undergraduate BMus students, particularly in music research, theory, and analysis of popular music.

Lindsay Steenberg and Lisa Coulthard

Lindsay Steenberg is Reader/Associate Professor in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University where she co-ordinates their graduate programme in Popular Cinema. She has published numerous articles on the crime and action genres. She is the author of Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science and Are You Not Entertained? Mapping the Gladiator in Visual Culture, for which she was awarded a Research Excellence Fellowship from Oxford Brookes. She is currently working on a project with Lisa Coulthard, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to map the fight sequence in post-millennial action cinema.

Lisa Coulthard is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of British Columbia. She has published widely on cinematic violence and sound, crime television, and European and American cinemas. She is currently completing a manuscript based on research funded by a (SSHRC) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant on sound and violence. Along with Dr. Lindsay Steenberg as Collaborator, she holds a current SSHRC Insight Grant researching the fight scene in cinema.

Joe Sudlow

Joe Sudlow is an MPhil/PhD student at University of South Wales and a Lecturer in Creative Industries at Cardiff and Vale College. His current research project examines aural representations of reality in animated documentary filmmaking. Through a career in postproduction sound, he has worked on a range of television, radio, film and screen arts productions exhibited through broadcast (BBC, Channel 4, Disney) and in competition at international film festivals (Oberhausen, Sundance).

Claus Tieber

Claus Tieber is the principal investigator of a research project about screenwriting musical numbers at the University of Vienna. He teaches film studies at universities in Vienna, Brno, Kiel and Salamanca. After working as a commissioning editor for TV movies at the Austrian Broadcast Company (ORF) he started to write his Habilitation (post-doc thesis) about the history of the American screenplay (Schreiben für Hollywood: Das Drehbuch im Studiosystem, Münster: Lit Verlag, 2008) and switched from practice to research. His publications include a monograph on storytelling in silent cinema (Stummfilmdramaturgie. Erzählweisen des Amerikanischen Feature Films 1917 – 1927) and an edited volume on film music in silent cinema (The Sounds of Silent Films: New Perspectives on History, Theory and Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014, ed. with Anna K. Windisch).