IAMHIST is managed by the Council, as duly elected representatives of the membership. The council meets once or twice a year to discuss upcoming conferences, events and initiatives. Every two years, an election of council members will be organised among the members. The current council is presided by Leen Engelen.
Members:
Melanie Bell | Ciara Chambers | Llewella Chapman | Leen Engelen | Tobias Hochscherf | Richard Legay | Paul Lesch | Alessandra Luciano | Cynthia J Miller | Katharina Niemeyer | Roel Vande Winkel
| Former IAMHIST presidents |
Editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television:
Melanie Bell is an Associate Professor in Film and Media at the University of Leeds, UK. She has a BA in Literature and History, an MA in Cinema Studies, and PhD in Film and Gender from the University of Hull’s Centre for Gender Studies. She has taught courses in British cinema history, Hollywood film, and feminist media studies at the universities of Hull, Portsmouth, Newcastle and Leeds. Her recent research investigates the economic and creative contribution of women to historical British film production – as stars, industry workers and creative ‘elites’ – and has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Screen and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Her next publication Work! A Feminist History of Women and Film will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2020. Melanie has worked extensively with trade union records and oral history, and is currently pursing research in feminist archives, archiving and historiography. She has supported junior colleagues in her role as academic mentor and is particularly interested in intergenerational dialogue between media practitioners.
Ciara Chambers obtained a BA (Hons) in English Literature (Queen’s University Belfast), M.Phil in Psychoanalytic Studies (Trinity College, Dublin) and PhD in Film Studies (University of Ulster, Coleraine). Having previously worked as Digital Film Archive Outreach Officer for Northern Ireland Screen and Acting Archive Manager for Belfast Exposed Photography, she worked on the Irish Research Council funded Capturing the Nation project, a collaboration between University College Cork and the IFI Irish Film Archive, resulting in the digitization and cataloguing of small gauge amateur film, some of which is now available on the IFI player. Ciara is Head of the Department of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork and has worked on archival projects and digitization initiatives with the IFI Irish Film Archive, Northern Ireland Screen, Belfast Exposed Photography, UTV, BBC, and the British Universities Film and Video Council (now Learning on Screen). She was scriptwriter and associate producer on Éire na Nuachtscannán (www.irelandinthenewsreels.com), a Broadcasting Authority of Ireland funded television series for TG4 based on her book Ireland in the Newsreels (Irish Academic Press, 2012). She is co-editor of Researching Newsreels: Local, National and Transnational Case Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) with Mats Jönsson and Roel Vande Winkel and has also published articles in the Journal of Film Preservation, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Alphaville Journal of Film and Screen Media and has contributed chapters on newsreels and amateur film to various edited collections. She is currently book reviews editor for the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and is on the editorial teams of Estudios Irlandeses and Alphaville Journal of Film and Screen Media for which she recently edited an issue on creative practice http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue17.html. She is a board member of Irish Screen Studies and a member of The Newsreel Network and the Northern Ireland Film Heritage and Archive Working Group.
Llewella Chapman took her BA (Hons) in Performance Design and Production, specializing in costume design, at the University of Leeds, her MA in Adaptation by Independent Study at De Montfort University and her PhD in Film and Media at the University of East Anglia. Her PhD thesis researched the relationship between film, television and Hampton Court Palace (1911-2016), where she used to work as a State Apartment Warder. Llewella is currently a Visiting Scholar in the School of History at the University of East Anglia. Her research interests include film history, British cinema, gender and costume. Her first monograph, Fashioning James Bond: Costume, Gender and Identity in the World of 007, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. It researches the costumes designed and produced for the Eon Productions James Bond film franchise. Llewella is also contracted to edit a collection, Raiding Indiana Jones: Histories, Franchises, Legacies (Manchester University Press, 2022) and author a BFI Film Classic on From Russia With Love (Bloomsbury, 2022). She is currently the IAMHIST Blog editor, and the webmaster/online community manager for the IAMHIST website.
Leen Engelen is a Belgian film a media historian. She is teaching at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels and Genk and is also Affiliated Professor in the Arts at the Faculty of Arts of KU Leuven University. Her research focusses on cinema and media cultures, cultures of spectacle and visual culture. She has a special interest in the First World War era and the interwar period. Leen has published in a variety of national and international academic journals and is (co-)editor of several books. She is laureate of the Science Communication Award of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB). She is currently President of the International Association for Media and History.
Tobias Hochscherf is Professor of Audiovisual Media at the University of 
Applied Sciences Kiel in Germany and the University of Flensburg. 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 at the University of Applied Sciences 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 and film production. 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 published Beyond the Bridge: Contemporary Danish Television Drama (2017). He is also 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 Jahrbuch Immersive Medien.
Richard Legay teaches Public History at the University of Tübingen in Germany. He holds a PhD in radio history and popular culture from the University of Luxembourg, and his research focused on the transnational history of Radio Luxembourg and Europe n°1 in the 1960s. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and the Université de Lorraine, and was a visiting researcher in Bournemouth and Hamburg. He published several articles on media history, including the co-editing of a special issue on transnational radio history for the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. His research interests include radio, popular culture, transnational history, and cross-media studies.
Paul Lesch (PhD), teaches film and history at the University of Luxembourg and the Miami University John E. Dolibois European Center in Luxembourg. He is the director of the documentary film Call Her Madam (Samsa Film, 1997) on the American diplomat and party-giver Perle Mesta. He is the author, among others, of Heim ins Ufa-Reich? NS-Filmpolitik und die Rezeption deutscher Filme in Luxemburg 1933-1944 (WVT, Trier 2002) and In the Name of Public Order and Morality. Cinema Control and Film Censorship in Luxembourg 1895-2005 (CNA, 2005) and he has contributed articles to publications such as Three Spotlights on Hitch (Cinémathèque de la Ville de Luxembourg, 1999); Wallflower Critical Guide. Contemporary British and Irish Film Directors (Wallflower 2001); René Deltgen. eine Schauspielerkarriere (CNA, 2002); Cinema and the Swastika. The international Expansion of Third Reich Cinema (ed. by Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, Palgrave, 2007); Travelling Cinema in Europe (ed. by Martin Loiperdinger, Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 2008); Stellar Encounters. Stardom in Popular European Cinema (Ed. by Tytti Soila, John Libbey Publishing, 2009) and Unmögliche Liebe. Asta Nielsen, ihr Kino (Verlag Filmarchiv Austria, 2009). He has also written for international journals such as Film History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and Cinema & Cie. In 2010/11 he co-curated the exhibition Hugo Gernsback. An Amazing Story.
Alessandra Luciano received her master’s at Columbia University in film studies, and later enrolled in the master’s program Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image at the University of Amsterdam. In 2013, she started working as head of the film and television archives at the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA) in Luxembourg. Then in 2019, she became Digital Curator, where her priority has been the implementation of long-term preservation and access strategies to ensure a sustainable legacy to the country’s audiovisual heritage. Recently, she has been promoted to spearhead the institution’s growth toward a more organizational and digitally mature enterprise. Since leaving academia, she has been able to combine theory with practice, across a spectrum of diverse interests and fields. Alessandra is on the organising committee of the international conference No Time To Wait, works as copy-editor for the international peer-reviewed academic journal Cinéma&Cie, joined the EUscreen Foundation board last year, and has recently been invited to join the Editorial Board of the Europeana Subtitled project.
Cynthia J. Miller is a cultural anthropologist, specializing in popular culture and visual media, and her writing has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies across the disciplines. She has been named a Kansas Humanities Council Scholar, a Research Fellow of the Will Rogers Memorial, and Fellow of the Boston Historical Society. Her awards include the 2012 Jim Welsh Prize for Achievement in Adaptation Studies and the 2013 Peter C. Rollins Book Award in Popular Culture Studies. Cynthia has also produced several visual media exhibitions, including “Images from the Streets: The Homeless Photography Project” and “Underground Art: Art and Poetry by Boston’s Homeless,” which have been featured on ABC’s “Chronicle.” Cynthia serves as series editor for the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group’s Film and History series and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Popular Culture, the Journal of Popular Television, and the Bloomsbury Press Guides to Contemporary Directors series. She is also the editor of seventeen scholarly volumes focused on the interplay of film and society, as well as two forthcoming volumes and over 70 articles.
Katharina Niemeyer is a media theorist, professor at the School of Media (Faculty of Communication) at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and director of CELAT-UQAM (Centre de recherche Cultures-Arts-Sociétés). Trained in cultural sciences, media archaeology and media philosophy at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Germany), as well as in communication sciences at the University of Lyon (France) and at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), her research focuses on the relationships between media and (digital) technologies, temporalities, memory, and history. She recently co-edited the book Nostalgies contemporaines : médias, cultures et technologies, published in 2021 by Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Katharina is co-curator of the TOTAL SCREEN exhibition that took place in May/June 2021 in Montreal at the Design Center: https://ecrantotal.uqam.ca/. She is a member of the editorial board of the journals MAST (Media Art Study and Theory) and Memory, Mind & Media (Cambridge University Press). Katharina Niemeyer is also co-founder of the International Media and Nostalgia Network. Her current research projects and publications can be found here: https://kniemeyer.net.
Roel Vande Winkel is associate professor at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven – Institute for Media Studies) and, at LUCA School of Arts, course director of DocNomads, the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Documentary Film Directing. He is a long standing member of the Iamhist Council and associate editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. His work was published in international academic journals such as Javnost, Communications: the European journal of communication research, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Filmblatt, Historical Reflections, Journal of Film Preservation, Film International and Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. He edited the volumes Cinema and the Swastika (with David Welch), Perspectives on European Film and History (with Leen Engelen), Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship around the World (with Daniel Biltereyst) and Researching Newsreels Local, National and Transnational Case Studies (with Ciara Chambers and Mats Jönsson). He als published various monographs in Dutch. A long term project is a monograph on Belgian cinema (the Belgian Film Guild – la Gilde du Film or Filmgilde) under the Nazi occupation (1940-1944). In 2018, he developed, with Leen Engelen, the Cine Zoologie programming database. Research interests: the German and the European film industry in 1933-1945, newsreels, media and propaganda, historical films, the development of the Belgian film industry and Roman-Catholic engagements with audio-visual media.
Editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
James Chapman took his BA (History) and MA (Film Studies) at the University of East Anglia and then undertook his doctoral research at Lancaster University, writing his PhD thesis on the role of official film propaganda in Britain during the Second World War. In 1996 he joined The Open University, where he taught a broad range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and was principal contributing author to the university’s first dedicated course on Film and Television History. He joined the University of Leicester as its founding Professor of Film Studies in January 2006. He was a Council member of the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) and in 2010 became editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. When Professor Chapman is not lecturing his students on why we should take James Bond seriously or decoding the semiotics of Diana Rigg, he can usually be found following Test Match Special. Professor Chapman’s research focuses on British popular culture, especially cinema and television in their historical contexts. He is interested in the role of the media as propaganda, the representation of war and history, and the cultural politics of popular fictions – including, but not limited to, Dick Barton, Dan Dare, James Bond, The Avengers and Doctor Who. He has recently completed the first book to offer a cultural history of British comics from their origin to the present, and is currently researching books on Science Fiction Cinema and Contemporary British Television Drama. He is also co-investigator on a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council project ‘Spaces of Television’ in association with the University of Reading and the University of Glamorgan.
Former IAMHIST Presidents
David Culbert was John L. Loos Professor of History, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA; formerly, Assistant Professor of History at Yale. He received his B.A and his B.Mus. from Oberlin College. He was a former IAMHIST president, and emeritus editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. He has published many books, including News for Everyman (Greenwood, 1976); Mission to Moscow (U. of Wisconsin, 1980); Film and Propaganda in America (5 vols., Greenwood, 1990-1993); with John Chambers, World War II, Film, and History (Oxford, 1996); with Nicholas Cull and David Welch, Propaganda and Mass Persuasion (ABC-Clio, 2003); and translator (plus foreword) of Leni Riefenstahl’s Behind the Scenes of the National Party Convention Film (IHF, 2010). He was a Fellow at the Wilson Center, Washington, DC; the National Humanities Institute, Yale; a Kellogg National Fellow; and a Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and is listed in Who’s Who in the World. He served as a consultant for many television documentaries, Director of Historical Research for Ken Burns’s Huey Long, and consultant for Ray Mueller’s Leni Riefenstahl film. He received three TAF Outstanding Teaching Awards from LSU’s Honors. David’s obituary can be viewed here: http://iamhist.net/2017/05/missed-david-h-culbert-1943-2017/
Nicholas J. Cull is Professor of Public Diplomacy and Director of the Masters Program in Public Diplomacy at USC and former President of IAMHIST. He took both his BA and PhD at the University of Leeds. While a graduate student he studied at Princeton in the USA as a Harkness Fellow of the Commonwealth Fund of New York. From 1992 to 1997 he was lecturer in American History at the University of Birmingham. From September 1997 to August 2005 he was Professor of American Studies and Director of the Centre for American Studies in the Department of History at Leicester. His research and teaching interests are broad and inter-disciplinary, and focus on the the role of culture, information, news and propaganda in foreign policy. He is the author of The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency: American Public Diplomacy, 1989-2001 (Palgrave, 2012). His previous monographs were The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (Cambridge, 2008) and Selling War (Oxford,1995), both of which were named by Choice Magazine as outstanding academic texts of their respective year. He is the co-editor (with David Culbert and David Welch) of Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500-present (ABC-Clio, 2003) which was one of Booklist magazine’s reference books of the year, and co-editor with David Carrasco of Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants (University of New Mexico Press, 2004). He has published numerous articles on the theme of propaganda and media history. He is an active film historian who has been part of the movement to include film and other media within the mainstream of historical sources. His film work includes two works co-authored with James Chapman: Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2009) and Projecting Tomorrow: Science Fiction and Popular Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2013). He is a member of the Public Diplomacy Council and has worked closely with the British Council’s Counterpoint Think Tank.
David Ellwood was formerly associate professor of contemporary international history at 
the University of Bologna (until November 2012); has served as president of the International Association for Media and History (1996-2002); Ph.D., Italian studies, University of Reading. He was also President of IAMHIST.
Publications
The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford University Press, 2012) (Italian edition, Carocci Editore, 2012) (second edition 2016); The Movies as History: Visions of the 20th Century, editor (Sutton Publishing Ltd., 2000); Hollywood in Europe: experiences of a cultural hegemony (VU University Press, 1994); Rebuilding Europe: The U.S. and the Reconstruction of Western Europe (Pearson Longman Publishing, 1992) (Italian edition, Il Mulino 1996); Hollywood in Europa: industria, politica, pubblico del cinema 1945-1960¸ with G. Brunetta (Casa Usher, 1991); Italy 1943-45: The Politics of Liberation (Leicester University Press, 1985). Frequent contributor of articles and reviews to academic journals, policy forums and news outlets.
Karsten Fledelius is an Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies at The 
Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen. His research focuses upon Central and East European film culture, Media as part of conflicts in Former Yugoslavia, Eastern and Central European responses to the EU and Europeanisation, Religion and European culture and politics, with particular reference to the Balkans, Turkey, Russia, the Ukraine and the Caucausus region, Islam and Europe with particular reference to the question of secularisation, democracy and culture, Legacies of empire in contemporary Europe (Ottoman Turkey, Austria-Hungary). Karsten was the first IAMHIST Secretary General from 1977 to 1979 and served as IAMHIST President from 1979 to 1985. He served on the council as a past-president.
Christine Whittaker, a former IAMHIST President, graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in Modern Languages and joined the BBC’s World Service. After a year she moved to television where she became a researcher on documentary films, eventually finding people and archive footage for historical documentaries. The archive took over, she began to specialise and was responsible for the archive on many award-winning series, such as All Our Working Lives, Out of the Doll’s House, An Ocean Apart, Nippon, Pandora’s Box. She was the Archive Producer on the 26-part series People’s Century, worked as an Archive Consultant on numerous projects for television and cinema, and has lectured and conducted workshops on the use of archive. She was twice the recipient of the BFI’s Archival Achievement Award and received Focal International’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. She was the first IAMHIST President to come from a television, rather than an academic background and continues to encourage and enjoy debate within the organisation. Christine’s obituary can be viewed here: http://iamhist.net/2017/08/christine-whittaker-1942-2017/
