As it is so nice and sunny today, and Film Studies For Free‘s author (not pictured above) likes the outdoors as much as, if not more than, the dark confines of the cinema, or the equally artificially-lit terrain of her happy, new-media, hunting grounds, she will strive to keep her extraneous comments to a bare minimum as she snappily shares with you the following nods to excellent online resources, before heading for the nearby hills…
- Do, please, check out Gramma/Γράμμα: Journal of Theory and Criticism; it’s an international peer-reviewed journal, published in English and Greek once a year by the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. It welcomes articles and book reviews from a wide range of areas within the theory and criticism of literature and culture, especially ones with an interdisciplinary approach. The latest issue – Vol. 15, Shakespeare Worldwide and the Idea of an Audience, edited by Tina Krontiris and Jyotsna Singh – has a good article on film: Xenia Georgopoulou’s ‘Parting “totally sucks”: Filming Romeo and Juliet for Generation X‘. Back articles of note include the following very interesting pieces: Joan Copjec, The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema; Sean Homer, “The Roma do not Exist”: The Roma as an Object of Cinematic Representation and the Question of Authenticity; Sylvia Karastathi, Filming the Dutch Still Life: Peter Greenaway’s Objects; and Mary Jacobus, Cloud Studies: The Visible Invisible.
- eSharp: eSharp is an international online journal for postgraduate research in the arts, humanities, social sciences and education. Based at the University of Glasgow and run entirely by graduate students, it aims to provide a critical but supportive entry into the realm of academic publishing for emerging academics, including postgraduates and recent postdoctoral students. There are fewer articles on film, than Gramma, but still some worthwhile ones, for example: Jessie Gibbs, Road Movies Mapping the Nation: Y tu mamá también; Anna Ball, Writing in the Margins: Exploring the Borderland in the Work of Janet Frame and Jane Campion; Sarah Godfrey, Villainous Victims: The Paradox of the ‘Damaged’ Man in Naked and Nil By Mouth; and last but not least, Shira Segal, The Masculinization Project of Hospital Birth Practices and Hollywood Comedies.
- Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture is a peer-reviewed journal, published four times a year in hard copy and PDF format, and based at the University of Westminster. Particular interests include, but are not limited to, work related to Popular Culture, Media Audiences, Political Economy, Promotional Culture, New Media, Political communication, Migration and Diasporic Studies. A major goal of the WPCC is to help develop a de-westernised and transcultural sphere that engages both young and established scholars from different parts of the world in a critical debate about the relationship between communication, culture and society in the 21st Century. What’s on offer here at WPCC is mostly (excellent) Media Studies but a brilliant film-media ‘crossover’ piece is Su Holmes’ (a former colleague of mine, now at the University of East Anglia) unmissable: `Starring Dyer?’: Re-visiting Star Studies and Contemporary Celebrity Culture.
- cinetext is a bilingual internet forum for film and philosophy located at the University of Vienna, addressing students, researchers, scholars, and anyone with an interest in the thoughtful exploration of cinema, film, and television. Check out the index at the site as there are far too many worthwhile pieces (in English and German) here to list, but Film Studies For Free‘s favourites were Daniel Garrett, The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc; and Mattias Frey, Supermodernity, Capital, and Narcissus: The French Connection to Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video
- Finally, for today, a warm recommendation for Critical Studies in Television, a new website connected to the hard-copy journal of the same name, published by Manchester University Press (HERE‘s a link to that journal‘s Open Access content), and edited by (among others) Kim Akass and Janet McCabe. As well as running the website, McCabe and Akass are also co-Series Editors of the wonderful Reading Contemporary Television series at IB Tauris . CST online is a scholarly resource and critical forum for studying television, sponsored by the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. Its mission is ‘to enrich television studies by providing comprehensive access to information, as well as to disseminate knowledge and stimulate debate’. The website is only just up and running but already has great items about and links to news stories, debate, and other media resources about global television. A particularly nice feature is its ‘Featured Archive’ spot. The site is updated twice weekly with information on new TV books, Calls for Papers and invitations to forthcoming conferences. And there’s a space for ‘TV Reflections’ currently filled by a nice piece by McCabe and Akass themselves, ‘Writing TV into Discourse‘, with a great clip of one of Film Studies For Free’s favourite TV shows, Ugly Betty, in Arabic. Good luck to CST online!
CATHERINE GRANT 