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Research Interests

My main research interests are early and silent cinema, British cinema, queer and trans film histories, and screen archives and archival research methods. I welcome PhD proposals relating to any of those areas.

My current research focuses on the history of queer and trans labour behind the scenes in British cinema, from the silent era onwards. I am especially interested in using archival evidence, along with ideas and methods from queer studies, production studies and labour history, to explore the contributions and personal experiences of LGBTQ+ movie workers.

My book , examined the early years of film acting in British cinema, up to the end of the 1920s. I was interested in how the discourse around film acting as a distinct profession and set of skills developed in this period, and how it fed into early notions of screen stardom as a vehicle for social mobility and self-fashioning. The book also looked for ways to recover the experiences of those film fans, especially young, working-class women, who attempted (and often failed) to become film actors themselves.

I have also undertaken research into the early history of film exhibition in the UK, some of which appears on the scholarly website , and I am the co-editor, with Pam Hirsch, of the essay collection .

Selected Publications

Books

• (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017; paperback edition: Bloomsbury, 2021)
• , co-edited with Pam Hirsch (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Journal Articles

• , Screen, 65:3 (2024), 305-326 (Winner of the BAFTSS 2025 Publication Award for Best Article or Chapter)
• , Early Popular Visual Culture, 19:4 (2022), 342-363. Special double issue on ‘The Gender of Early Cinema’
• , British Journal of Cinema and Television, 17:3 (2020), 289-312
• , Gender & History, 32:1 (2020), 86-107
• , Early Popular Visual Culture, 13:1 (2015), 66-82
• , Film History, 26:3 (2014), 84-105
• , Early Popular Visual Culture, 11:3 (2011), 191-201

Book Chapters

• , in Gábor Gergely and Susan Hayward (eds), The Routledge Companion to European Cinema (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 285-293
• , in Pam Hirsch and Chris O’Rourke, (eds), London on Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp.117-131
• 'The Municipal Plunge: Silent Cinema and the Social Life of Swimming Pools’, in Chris Brown and Pam Hirsch (eds), The Cinema of the Swimming Pool (Oxford: Lang, 2014), pp. 21-36
• 'In the Flesh: Personal Appearances and the Picture Personality in Britain', in Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier and Tami Williams (eds), Performing New Media, 1890-1915 (New Barnet: Libbey, 2014), pp. 67-75
• 'Cinema Re-Mystified: A.S. Appelbee's Technological Ghost Story', in Andrew Shail (ed.), Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction, 1896-1912 , co-authored with David Trotter (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011), pp. 46-57

Ph.D. Students

• , 'Thinking Outside the Magic Box: Reconsidering the Work and Inventions of William Friese Greene and their Contribution to Early British Cinema History', co-supervised with De Montfort University (fully funded by the AHRC Midlands 4 Cities doctoral training partnership)
• , 'Visible Queer Trans Men in the Archive of Moving Image Representations: From AIDS to the "Transgender Tipping Point" and Beyond', co-supervised with the University of Birmingham (fully funded by the AHRC Midlands 4 Cities doctoral training partnership)
• Ayan DawnLink opens in a new window, 'The Tramp in India: Charlie Chaplin and the Cultural Politics of Transnational Reception, Appropriation and Impersonation' (fully funded by the ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ Chancellors Scholarship)
• James DavisLink opens in a new window, 'Visualising Mental Health: The Role of Intersectional Marginality in the Persistence of the Hollywood Film Musical'
• Jess Sinclair, 'When Ladies Meet: Homosociality, Female Fandom and the Woman’s Film in 1930s Hollywood'

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