Brett Bowles, James Chapman, Leen Engelen, Tobias Hochscherf, Ekaterina Kalinina, Katharina Niemeyer, Roel Vande Winkel, Johnny Walker, Jessica Whitehead
Brett Bowles I am a specialist of contemporary France, focusing on film and other visual media as forms of social and political discourse. I wrote a book about the fiction films of Marcel Pagnol (Manchester UP, 2012) and have published numerous journal articles and book chapters on newsreels and documentaries produced during the Second World War by the Vichy French government and the Nazis. Most recently, I began a new comparative project on American and French illustrated posters in the context of the First World War, with an eye to expanding the scope to Great Britain and Germany in what I hope will become a book.
In addition to serving on the editorial boards or co-editing journals such as French Historical Studies, French History, and Modern & Contemporary France, I have been a member of IAMHIST since 2004, editing book reviews for the HJFRT from 2005 to 2016 and serving on the IAMHIST council for much of that same period. I also had the nerve-wracking pleasure of hosting the IAMHIST conference in Bloomington in 2015. I owe the association and the journal a large debt of gratitude for having been two of the most influential forces on me intellectually and professionally.
Beyond expanding my knowledge into areas that I might not otherwise have explored, they allowed me to meet many new research collaborators and friends from all over the world. I hope to continue on the IAMHIST council not only to continue benefitting from that dynamic, but to “pay forward” what the journal and association have given me to younger scholars in earlier stages of their careers.
James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester (UK). He has been a member of the IAMHIST Council since 2006 and editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television since 2011.
James specialises in British cinema and television history, the politics of popular fictions and questions of research methodologies in film and media history. He is author or co-author of 14 books including The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939-1945 (I.B. Tauris, 1998), Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (I.B. Tauris, 2005), War and Film (Reaktion, 2008), British Comics: A Cultural History (2011), A New History of British Documentary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series (Manchester University Press, 2015).
Leen Engelen – I am a media historian based at LUCA School of Arts and KU Leuven in Belgium. I studied Social Sciences at the universities of Leuven and Ulster (Northern Ireland) and I received a PhD from Leuven University. I have published on film history and visual culture in several national and international academic journals and I am co-editor (with Roel Vande Winkel) of Perspectives on European Film and History (Academia Press, 2007) and (with Kris Van Heuckelom) of European Cinema after the Wall. East-West Mobility in Post 1989 European Cinema (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). My current research interests include cinema culture and trade before the Second World War, New cinema history, history of the film trade, film and the First World War, picture postcards and (movie) ephemera. I have been an active IAMHIST council member since 2004, including 11 years as IAHMIST secretary-general. I recently became vice-president of the association. In this capacity I co-organise the annual IAMHIST master class and, since 2017, the IAMHIST Challenge. I communicate with the IAMHIST members about current IAMHIST affairs and calls and I organise the council elections.
Tobias Hochscherf is Professor of Audiovisual Media at the University of Applied Sciences Kiel and the University of Flensburg in Germany. He studied German, English and Media at the universities in Hamburg and Kiel and received a PhD from the University of Liverpool (UK). From 2006 to 2009 he worked as senior lecturer in film and television studies at Northumbria University (UK). Owing to a background in broadcast journalism and filmmaking, he is editor-in-chief of the student radio station in Kiel. He teaches a variety of undergraduate (BA) and postgraduate (MA) modules on media, film and television – including courses on film and television history, media theory, radio broadcasting, mobile journalism and film production. In summer 2017 he will be teaching a course on wartime propaganda at the LSU Honors College as visiting professor.
He is Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK) and Associate Dean at the Faculty of Media at the University of Applied Sciences in Kiel. Tobias Hochscherf’s research focuses on film and television history as well as contemporary television drama; he has recently co-edited a themed issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television with Katharina Niemeyer of historical dimensions of film theory (2016) and published Beyond the Bridge: Contemporary Danish Television Drama (2017). He, too, is author of The Continental Connection: German-speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1927-45 (2011) and co-editor of Divided, but not disconnected: German experiences of the Cold War (2010) and British Science Fiction Film and Television: Critical Essays (2011). He is associate editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, The Journal of Popular Television and the the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema.
Ekaterina Kalinina is a postdoctoral researcher at Department of Art and Cultural Studies at Copenhagen University, Denmark. She completed her PhD in Media and Communication Studies with the project ‘Mediated post-Soviet nostalgia’ at Södertörn University, Sweden. She worked as a research fellow at Swedish National Defence University researching on the questions of patriotism, biopolitics, nostalgia and national identity. Ekaterina Kalinina is also actively engaged in practice based research and works as a project manager at the Swedish organization Nordkonst, where she runs cultural projects and conducts research on cross-cultural artistic practices and intercultural communication. She is currently a head of a collaborative street art project Nord2Nord financed by Swedish Institute. She is also a founding member of the International Media and Nostalgia Network. Her current post doc project ‘Uncertainty of Digital Archives: Exploring nostalgia and civic engagement’ investigates the role of affective mnemonic experiences, such as nostalgia, in triggering social mobilisation in digital and physical environments.
My motivation to join the council of IAMHIST is determined by a will to make it an organisation of media historians with a growing number of young scholars and women. First of all, I believe that media history field should deserve more attention of young researchers who are working with contemporary media development in the modern political context. Second, I would like to see the organisation having a greater visibility among scholars from Nordic contexts and Eastern Europe, especially Russia and Ukraine, which until now are almost absent. This could be done through increasing ambassadorship among young scholars coming and studying the region and stimulating participation by attracting additional funding. Knowing the language and having contacts in the region I would be able to contribute to this development. Third, my passion also lays in supporting female scholars and providing equal opportunities and I would like to take task on advancing this idea in the organisation.
Katharina Niemeyer – I am a council member of the International Association for Media and History – webmaster and community manager for the association and from July 2017 on, book review editor of the Historical Journal for Film, Radio and Television. This is why I wish to stand for election again as I enjoy the work between historians and media scholars.
Media culture, media and communication theory and memory studies are my major fields of research. I am particularly interested in the relation of media, memory, history and nostalgia and co-founded the International Media and Nostalgia Network in 2015 after having edited the volume Media and Nostalgia. Yearning for the past, present and future in 2014 (Palgrave Macmillan). I also work on (international) media events; their ‘liveness’ and commemorations or artistic extensions and transformations. Related to these topics I published several articles and two books (Die Mediasphären des Terrorismus, Avinus, Berlin, 2006 / De la chute du mur de Berlin au 11 Septembre 2001, Antipodes, Lausanne, 2011). A special journal issue, co-edited with Frédéric Lambert for Communications et Langages just came out: Les devenirs artistiques de l’information.
I am a professor for media theory at the University of Quebec in Montreal (The Media School) and used to be an Associate Professor at the French Press Institute / University Paris 2, Sorbonne Universities and was a visiting scholar at Media@McGill from February-June 2017.
Roel Vande Winkel (Belgium) is associate editor of the ‘Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television’ and ran its (European) book review section for nearly 14 years (2004-2017). His publications include ‘ Cinema and the Swastika – The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema’ (with D. Welch) and ‘Silencing Cinema – Film Censorship around the World’ (with D. Biltereyst). His research focuses on film (production, exhibition, distribution) in Europe (1918-1945) and on newsreels and documentaries in the interwar years and in the Second World War. He is professor of film & TV studies at the KU Leuven and at the LUCA School of Arts in Belgium.
Johnny Walker is Senior Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University in the UK, prior to which he was Lecturer in Film Studies within the Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre at De Montfort University. His research interests comprise cultural and industrial histories of popular film genres and home-viewing technologies. His academic writing in these areas has appeared in various journals such as the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Post Script and the Journal of British Cinema and Television, and in collections such as the Routledge Companion to British Cinema History (2017), Italian Horror Cinema (2016) and Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema (2014). His books include, as author, Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and, as co-editor, Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2016). He is founding series co-editor of Bloomsbury’s Global Exploitation Cinemas book series, sits on the editorial board of the Horror Studies series (University of Wales Press), and is the reviews editor of the Journal of Popular Television (Intellect). Johnny has delivered various invited talks about his research in the UK and Europe, including recent keynotes in Dortmund and Canterbury, and has been a principal organiser of numerous international conferences and symposia. Currently he is working on a book-length history of video rental culture in Britain. He would feel humbled and privileged to serve as a council member for IAMHIST and looks forward to the challenges and rewards ahead should he be elected.
Jessica Whitehead – I am a PhD candidate in Communication and Cultural Studies at York University under the supervision of Dr. Paul Moore. I am ABD with plans to defend in the fall of 2017. My dissertation, Cinema-going on the Margins: The Mascioli Film Circuit of Northeastern Ontario, explores how the remote geographic location of mining communities in Canada’s north created unique cinema-going experiences for the immigrant workers who populated the area. My research has been featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporations’ radio show Up North and in The Timmins Daily Press. I have a recent publication on movie star contests in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures, and several forthcoming publications concentrating on the history of movie-going and exhibition in Canada.
My motivation for becoming a member of the IAMHIST council is to help organize scholarly events. Under the direction of Dr Moore, I helped to write a successful Social Science and Humanities Research Council Connection Grant that will fund a conference, to bring over 100 film exhibition researchers from across the globe to present on film reception and distribution networks. I have played an active role in co-organizing the Circuits of Cinema conference, which will be held in Toronto at the end of June. This experience will be an asset to the IAMHIST council, and I envision myself working closely with other council members to organize upcoming conferences and writing funding applications for future events.
