One of my former undergraduate students, Adam Herron (currently an MA student at University of East Anglia), has just sent off the final manuscript for his first article, to be published in Film Matters. Entitled "Victim Sells: The Commercial Context of Snuff Fiction and A Serbian Film", it is based on his excellent undergraduate dissertation. Adam will continue at UEA as a PhD student from September.

Many congratulations, Adam!

It's that time of year again!

Next week sees me deliver a paper at the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference as part of a panel on Transnational Identity and Exploitation Cinema. My paper is concerned with the birthing of the "shot on video" horror film and represents early forays into a future book-length project.

The panel, organised by Ryan Rashotte, looks great, and I'm really happy to be part of it:
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• Johnny Walker, Northumbria University: “Transnational Splatter Cinema and the Birth of the ‘Shot-on-Video’ Horror Film”
• Erin Wiegand, Northumbria University: “Mondo Americano: Tracing American and Italian Exploitation Traditions in the Mondo Films of Lee Frost and Bob Cresse”
• Ryan Rashotte, Lakeland University Japan: “Assimilating the Nude in Canuxploitation’s The Naked Flame”
• Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London: “The Whiteness of Cult”

In June 2018 I will return to the university where I got my first academic job, De Montfort in Leicester, to deliver a keynote at the 7th annual postgraduate conference. The theme -- to mark the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein -- is "New Perspectives on Horror, Science Fiction and the Monstrous Onscreen". I can't wait for this  one! I'm especially excited as I get to share keynoting duties with a good friend of mine, Dr Laura Mee (University of Hertfordshire).  

I need to confirm the topic of my talk soon. Watch this space...

Steve Jones has designed a swish new site for the Media Subject Group at Northumbria that can be accessed here: http://medianorthumbria.com.

The site contains information about my colleagues' subject specialisms, research, as well as general material relating to the undergraduate and postgraduate degrees we offer at Northumbria.

​Nice work, Steve!

Call for Presentations:

Horror, Cult and Exploitation Media II: A Research Workshop for PhDs and Early Career Researchers

Friday 4 May 2018, Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK  

A collaborative event between the Department of Social Sciences and the Department of Arts
PhD students and Early Career Researchers working in the field(s) of “horror, cult and exploitation” screen media, are invited to submit abstracts about their research to deliver at a workshop at Northumbria University on Friday 4 May 2018. The workshop – which follows on from a highly successful event last year – will take the format of a mini-symposium, and consist of three sessions, each made up of four speakers. Speakers will each deliver a 5-10 minute talk about their research to their peers and to a panel of academic experts from Northumbria’s Film and Television Research Group, providing a short introduction to their current project and identifying several questions for discussion. After each presentation, there will be an opportunity for the academic panel and other workshop participants to feedback to each speaker, and to ask follow-up questions.

The workshop is intended to be a small scale networking opportunity for scholars with shared research interests, and to provide a relatively informal opportunity for those newer to academia to engage in dialogue with more established researchers.
The event will close with a short presentation by James Campbell from Intellect Books, who will give advice about academic publishing (including converting a PhD thesis into a monograph).

The academic panel will comprise:

• Dr Russ Hunter (Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, co-editor of Italian Horror Cinema)
• Dr Steve Jones (Head of Media, author of Torture Porn: Popular Horror After Saw, co-editor of Zombies and Sexuality)
• Dr James Leggott (Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, author of Contemporary British Cinema: From Heritage to Horror)
• Dr Sarah Ralph (Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, co-author of Alien Audiences: Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie)
• Dr Jamie Sexton (Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, co-author of Cult Film: An Introduction, founding series co-editor of Cultographies)
• Dr Johnny Walker (Senior Lecturer in Media, author of Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society and co-editor of the Global Exploitation Cinemas book series)

Applicants are reminded that there are only twelve spaces available. Lunch and light refreshments will be provided throughout the day.

Please submit a 250 word summary of your project and a 50-100 word bio to the organiser, Dr Johnny Walker (johnny.walker@northumbria.ac.uk), by Friday 30 March 2018. Applicants will be notified of the outcome the following week.