Mark Adams received his First Class BA with Honours from Southampton Solent University, along with a Dissertation Award, before going on to obtain a Masters with Merit at Brunel University in Cult Film and Television. He is currently completing his thesis, on Theorising Fan-Producers: Re-examining Fandom, Resistance and Oppositions, also at Brunel. Mark is an assistant editor for Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media. Publications include a chapter on masochism in Screening Twilight: Critical Approaches to a Cinematic Phenomenon from I.B.Tauris.
Professor Martin Barker is Emeritus Professor at Aberystwyth University but also now Professor of Film & Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. He has for nearly forty years now been involved in research and argument around issues of censorship, moral campaigns, and the kinds of media material which arouse moralists’ wrath. He has researched, among other things, on the 1950s horror comics campaign and the 1980s video nasties campaign, and the Mail’s year-long attempt to get Cronenberg’s Crash banned in the UK. In recent years he has particularly focused on researching the real (as opposed to the hypothetical, supposed) audiences for so-called dangerous films. This culminated in 2006 in him being invited by the BBFC to lead a research project into audience responses to screened sexual violence. He is currently involved in a collaborative study of the audiences for online pornography.
Dr Jenny Barrett is the Programme Leader for Film Studies at Edge Hill University in the UK. Her recent article, ‘“Let’s Do Something You Won't Enjoy”: Dominatrix Porn, Performance and Subjectivity’ is published in Xavier Mendik’s edited collection Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2012). She has also published articles discussing the dominatrix in popular culture and BDSM stereotypes. Her other publications include Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity (I.B. Tauris, 2009) and ‘Bucking the Trend: Poitier at the Frontier,’ in European Journal of American Culture (2011).
Professor Mikita Brottman is a psychoanalyst, author and cultural critic known for her psychological readings of the dark and pathological elements of contemporary culture. Brottman's articles and case studies have appeared in Film Quarterly, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, New Literary History, and American Imago. She has written influentially on horror films, critical theory, reading, psychoanalysis, and the work of the American folklorist, Gershon Legman. She currently teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore
Dr Austin Fisher is Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of Bedfordshire and the author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western (IB Tauris, 2011). His main area of expertise concerns popular Italian cinema's engagement with 1960s and 1970s countercultures, and his recent research appears in The Italianist and the Blackwell Companion to Italian Cinema. He is currently working on a project investigating representations of terrorism in 1970s Italy. Austin is Co-Chair of the SCMS ‘Transnational Cinemas’ Scholarly Interest Group, and Director of the ‘Spaghetti Cinema’ festival in Luton, UK.
Nicolò Gallio is Ph.D Candidate in Film Studies at the Department of the Arts – DARvipem (University of Bologna). His research interests include digital media and moral panic, films and violence, with a particular focus on subgenres such as mondo movies and snuff films. Further research interests are related to documentary filmmaking, remix cultures and Audience Design. He has written essays on horror films, crowdsourced documentaries and mashups. Among his latest works: The Piracy Gene Mutation: Combinations of Crowdfunding and Mixed Delivery Systems (2013); The Crowd Strikes Back. Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding and the Changes of Intellectual Property (2013), both co-authored with Marta Martina as part of a research in progress on participatory productions. Nicolò Gallio is also a regular contributor to Cinergie – Il cinema e le altre arti.
Dr Claire Henry completed her PhD in Film Studies at Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge, UK) and also holds a BA(Hons), DipCA, and MA in Screen Studies. She has presented and published on the rape-revenge genre in Europe, North America, and Australia, and is currently working on a monograph on the contemporary genre. Her publications include book chapters in Rape in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and Beyond: Contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone Crime Fiction and Best Served Cold: Studies in Revenge, and a review of Rape in Art Cinema in the Senses of Cinema journal. She has taught screen studies at universities in both Australia and the UK in subjects including The New Extremism: Contemporary European Cinema, Introduction to Film Theory, Sex and the Screen, Television and Popular Culture, and Censorship: Film, Art & Media, and is currently teaching film theory and production at The University of Melbourne, Australia.
Dr Steve Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University, England. His research is principally focused on representations of sex and violence, the philosophy of self, gender politics, and ethics. His recent work includes the forthcoming monograph Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), and an anthology (co-edited with Shaka McGlotten) on zombies, sex, and sexuality. For more information, please visit www.drstevejones.co.uk
Mark McKenna is a PhD candidate from the University of Sunderland. His research is an analysis of the strategies and tactics employed in the distribution of the ‘video nasty’ with a particular focus on the Video Instant Picture Company (VIPCO), the company most closely associated with the 1984 video nasties moral panic and responsible for reissues of many of these titles in the 90s and 2000s.
Dr John Mercer is Senior Lecturer in Screen Cultures at The Birmingham School of Media and is a member of The Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. His research interests concern issues of gender and sexuality in popular culture. His primary research interest is in the impact and influence of pornography on gay culture. He is also interested in the relationships between aesthetic and stylistic tropes and emotional affects across media texts but especially in the form often described as melodrama. He has previously published work on gay pornography that has appeared in Paragraph (J. Still, ed), The Journal of Homosexuality, Pornocopia: Eclectic Views on Gay Pornography (T. Morrison, ed) and Framing Celebrity ( S. Redmond and S. Holmes, eds) and Hard to Swallow: Reading Pornography On-Screen (D. Kerr and C. Hines, eds). He is editor of The Journal of Gender Studies, and is the author (with Martin Shingler) of Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility.
Dr Xavier Mendik is Director of the Cine-Excess International Film Festival and DVD Label, and a Principal Lecturer in Film at the University of Brighton. He has written extensively on European and American cult film traditions, and some of his books (as author/editor/co-editor) in this area include: Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2012), 100 Cult Films (with Ernest Mathijs, Palgrave BFI, 2011), The Cult Film Reader (with Ernest Mathijs, McGraw Hill, 2008), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (with Ernest Mathijs, Wallflower Press, 2004), Shocking Cinema of the Seventies (Noir Publishing, 2002), Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (with Steven Jay Schneider, Wallflower Press, 2002), Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (2000) and Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics (with Graeme Harper, FAB Press, 2000). Xavier Mendik also has an established profile as a documentary director, and is currently developing a feature-length project on Italian cult film during the 1970s terrorist decade.
Giovanni Memola is a Ph.D. student currently enrolled for the University of Winchester. His research focuses on the Italian crime/detective film during the eventful ‘years of lead’ (late 1960s to early 1980s), in an investigation that relates the popularity of formulaic film cycles such as the giallo and the poliziottesco to broader socio-cultural and political concerns of that time. Awarded with a MA in Cult Film and Television at Brunel University (2010), Giovanni Memola has participated as speaker to a number of conferences in the UK also including Cine-Excess (2011), and has more recently curated a course on Italian cult cinema in Bergamo, Italy in 2013.
Emma Pett is a PhD Candidate at Aberystwyth University and a Research Assistant at the University of South Wales. Her research focuses on East Asian media, cultural policy, audience studies and cult cinema. She has written on the classification of Anime in the UK (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming) and Back to the Future as a cult blockbuster (Participations, 2013) and is currently researching the BBC’s policies of decentralisation, focusing on the Roath Lock Drama Studios in Cardiff. Contact: emma.pett@southwales.co.uk
Professor Martin Barker is Emeritus Professor at Aberystwyth University but also now Professor of Film & Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. He has for nearly forty years now been involved in research and argument around issues of censorship, moral campaigns, and the kinds of media material which arouse moralists’ wrath. He has researched, among other things, on the 1950s horror comics campaign and the 1980s video nasties campaign, and the Mail’s year-long attempt to get Cronenberg’s Crash banned in the UK. In recent years he has particularly focused on researching the real (as opposed to the hypothetical, supposed) audiences for so-called dangerous films. This culminated in 2006 in him being invited by the BBFC to lead a research project into audience responses to screened sexual violence. He is currently involved in a collaborative study of the audiences for online pornography.
Dr Jenny Barrett is the Programme Leader for Film Studies at Edge Hill University in the UK. Her recent article, ‘“Let’s Do Something You Won't Enjoy”: Dominatrix Porn, Performance and Subjectivity’ is published in Xavier Mendik’s edited collection Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2012). She has also published articles discussing the dominatrix in popular culture and BDSM stereotypes. Her other publications include Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity (I.B. Tauris, 2009) and ‘Bucking the Trend: Poitier at the Frontier,’ in European Journal of American Culture (2011).
Professor Mikita Brottman is a psychoanalyst, author and cultural critic known for her psychological readings of the dark and pathological elements of contemporary culture. Brottman's articles and case studies have appeared in Film Quarterly, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, New Literary History, and American Imago. She has written influentially on horror films, critical theory, reading, psychoanalysis, and the work of the American folklorist, Gershon Legman. She currently teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore
Dr Austin Fisher is Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of Bedfordshire and the author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western (IB Tauris, 2011). His main area of expertise concerns popular Italian cinema's engagement with 1960s and 1970s countercultures, and his recent research appears in The Italianist and the Blackwell Companion to Italian Cinema. He is currently working on a project investigating representations of terrorism in 1970s Italy. Austin is Co-Chair of the SCMS ‘Transnational Cinemas’ Scholarly Interest Group, and Director of the ‘Spaghetti Cinema’ festival in Luton, UK.
Nicolò Gallio is Ph.D Candidate in Film Studies at the Department of the Arts – DARvipem (University of Bologna). His research interests include digital media and moral panic, films and violence, with a particular focus on subgenres such as mondo movies and snuff films. Further research interests are related to documentary filmmaking, remix cultures and Audience Design. He has written essays on horror films, crowdsourced documentaries and mashups. Among his latest works: The Piracy Gene Mutation: Combinations of Crowdfunding and Mixed Delivery Systems (2013); The Crowd Strikes Back. Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding and the Changes of Intellectual Property (2013), both co-authored with Marta Martina as part of a research in progress on participatory productions. Nicolò Gallio is also a regular contributor to Cinergie – Il cinema e le altre arti.
Dr Claire Henry completed her PhD in Film Studies at Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge, UK) and also holds a BA(Hons), DipCA, and MA in Screen Studies. She has presented and published on the rape-revenge genre in Europe, North America, and Australia, and is currently working on a monograph on the contemporary genre. Her publications include book chapters in Rape in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and Beyond: Contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone Crime Fiction and Best Served Cold: Studies in Revenge, and a review of Rape in Art Cinema in the Senses of Cinema journal. She has taught screen studies at universities in both Australia and the UK in subjects including The New Extremism: Contemporary European Cinema, Introduction to Film Theory, Sex and the Screen, Television and Popular Culture, and Censorship: Film, Art & Media, and is currently teaching film theory and production at The University of Melbourne, Australia.
Dr Steve Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University, England. His research is principally focused on representations of sex and violence, the philosophy of self, gender politics, and ethics. His recent work includes the forthcoming monograph Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), and an anthology (co-edited with Shaka McGlotten) on zombies, sex, and sexuality. For more information, please visit www.drstevejones.co.uk
Mark McKenna is a PhD candidate from the University of Sunderland. His research is an analysis of the strategies and tactics employed in the distribution of the ‘video nasty’ with a particular focus on the Video Instant Picture Company (VIPCO), the company most closely associated with the 1984 video nasties moral panic and responsible for reissues of many of these titles in the 90s and 2000s.
Dr John Mercer is Senior Lecturer in Screen Cultures at The Birmingham School of Media and is a member of The Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. His research interests concern issues of gender and sexuality in popular culture. His primary research interest is in the impact and influence of pornography on gay culture. He is also interested in the relationships between aesthetic and stylistic tropes and emotional affects across media texts but especially in the form often described as melodrama. He has previously published work on gay pornography that has appeared in Paragraph (J. Still, ed), The Journal of Homosexuality, Pornocopia: Eclectic Views on Gay Pornography (T. Morrison, ed) and Framing Celebrity ( S. Redmond and S. Holmes, eds) and Hard to Swallow: Reading Pornography On-Screen (D. Kerr and C. Hines, eds). He is editor of The Journal of Gender Studies, and is the author (with Martin Shingler) of Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility.
Dr Xavier Mendik is Director of the Cine-Excess International Film Festival and DVD Label, and a Principal Lecturer in Film at the University of Brighton. He has written extensively on European and American cult film traditions, and some of his books (as author/editor/co-editor) in this area include: Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2012), 100 Cult Films (with Ernest Mathijs, Palgrave BFI, 2011), The Cult Film Reader (with Ernest Mathijs, McGraw Hill, 2008), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (with Ernest Mathijs, Wallflower Press, 2004), Shocking Cinema of the Seventies (Noir Publishing, 2002), Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (with Steven Jay Schneider, Wallflower Press, 2002), Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (2000) and Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics (with Graeme Harper, FAB Press, 2000). Xavier Mendik also has an established profile as a documentary director, and is currently developing a feature-length project on Italian cult film during the 1970s terrorist decade.
Giovanni Memola is a Ph.D. student currently enrolled for the University of Winchester. His research focuses on the Italian crime/detective film during the eventful ‘years of lead’ (late 1960s to early 1980s), in an investigation that relates the popularity of formulaic film cycles such as the giallo and the poliziottesco to broader socio-cultural and political concerns of that time. Awarded with a MA in Cult Film and Television at Brunel University (2010), Giovanni Memola has participated as speaker to a number of conferences in the UK also including Cine-Excess (2011), and has more recently curated a course on Italian cult cinema in Bergamo, Italy in 2013.
Emma Pett is a PhD Candidate at Aberystwyth University and a Research Assistant at the University of South Wales. Her research focuses on East Asian media, cultural policy, audience studies and cult cinema. She has written on the classification of Anime in the UK (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming) and Back to the Future as a cult blockbuster (Participations, 2013) and is currently researching the BBC’s policies of decentralisation, focusing on the Roath Lock Drama Studios in Cardiff. Contact: emma.pett@southwales.co.uk