Transnational Cinema

The Transnational Cinema research group (formerly World Cinema and Cosmopolitics) brings together MLAC researchers and students interested in cinematic representation and peripherality, film theory and criticism, and the politics and ethics of cinema beyond and across national boundaries and international circuits. Attentive to film-historical and cultural analysis approaches to national, minority and diasporic cinemas, this research group addresses regional, postcolonial, diasporic, transnational and global cinematic productions as well as discipline- and archive-bound critical practices. Research group members have led the organization of several local and international events, including film programmes, talks and discussions, and film festival programming. Our intellectual commitments dialogue at the intersection of the new cinemas of Latin American and the Caribbean; the Middle East and the Arab world; post-Soviet and Central Asian film; and other ‘third’, ‘accented’ and peripheral cinemas. Our group builds on its members’ diverse fields of expertise in critical theory and cultural analysis, literary criticism and history, and visual culture. We share a strong determination to establish transnational film studies at Durham and regionally at a time when the related fields of world and transnational cinema studies are consolidated nationally and expanding in exciting new directions. Film studies have figured prominently in MLAC’s curriculum since the early 2000s, thanks to the research and impact activities of colleagues working on French, German, Italian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, Russian, and Spanish national cinemas. Our teaching, research, and professional involvement in transnational, non-European, diasporic and ‘accented’ cinemas have added new and different emphases on film theory and criticism to MLAC’s intellectual environment. Consequently, the Transnational Cinema research group initiative represents a dynamic new development in MLAC’s long-standing profile in film studies. A key aspect of the research group’s plan for the immediate future is a more active focus on student participation and training; exploring postgraduate funding opportunities related to the group’s interests and expertise; and working on new grant proposals. This research group is linked with ‘Transnational Cinema’, a new module in the MA in Visual Culture and the MA in Languages, Literatures and Culture.

Contact Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián, Abir Hamdar or Dušan Radunović for more information.