Outstanding Achievement

Every year at the annual conference we present an award to a senior figure who has made a significant contribution to the discipline. Awards have been presented to both academics and industry practitioners.

We are delighted to award the 2022 Outstanding Achievement Award to Professor Linda Williams.

Across four decades, the work of Linda Williams has had the effect of, as one of her own collections puts it, reinventing Film and Television Studies. While many scholars became casualties of the abstractions of the theory wars, her work posed questions of deep methodological and ideological scope in concrete studies of history, text, and their manifestations on the very presence of the spectator's body. Her commitment to developing a feminist critique of culture opened up new ways of understanding pleasures as diverse as those offered by melodrama, horror and pornography. These pleasures are not undermined, but brought into clearer focus, by her continuing enquiry into structures of power, from analyses of the figure of Uncle Tom or the sprawling melodramatic universe of The Wire, or in a pioneering example of critical self-reflexivity found in 'Why I did not want to Write this Essay'. She has been a trailblazer in the discipline: her work on pornography was groundbreaking and continues to be central to the development of the “serious” study of adult media. She is one of the few scholars who has been able to achieve that rare combination of breadth, depth and accessibility, a combination that ensures the intellectual and political aspirations of her work are achieved.

Professor Williams is unable to attend the conference to accept the award, and has instead recorded a short video, which you can watch below.