I am deeply honoured to have been invited to speak at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in April of this year. My guest lecture to the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, entitled “Go West, Comrade! Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western”, will take place on Monday 16th April. The …

I’ll be addressing the Society for Cinema and Media Studied (SCMS) annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts, which runs from March 21st-25th at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel and Towers. My paper is entitled “Italian Americanisms: Popular Italian Cinema in the Light of the Transnational”, and the abstract is as follows:
Defining …

I’ll be presenting a paper to the annual conference of the UK’s Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) at the University of Bedfordshire in January. My paper is entitled ‘La cinema all’americana? Defining the Transnational “Popular”‘. It seeks to recalibrate the discourse surrounding popular Italian cinema by suggesting that, …

I shall be addressing the Irish Film Institute in Dublin before and after the screening of Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General / Quién sabe?, on Saturday August 27th 2011. The film is being shown as part of the IFI’s “Meanwhile, Back at the Revolution…” season, and I will be both …

I have written a short taster article for my forthcoming book, Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema. The article addresses the confused political agenda at the heart of Sergio Sollima’s Faccia a faccia (1967), and is up on the IB Tauris website, should you be interested.
Read …

Below are my lecture notes (hastily tidied up into more-or-less grammatical sentences for the benefit of the reader) and slides from a talk I have just this morning given at the international conference Film and Media 2011, at the Institute of Education, London. This is very much work in progress, …

I shall be giving a talk examining Giulio Petroni’s Tepepa (1969) as a site of contested cultural memory to the 2011 Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference, at the University of St. Andrews (6-9 July). The abstract is below.

La resistenza popolare: Transcultural Memory in Giulio Petroni’s Tepepa
That memories of the partisan …

I shall be giving a talk on the cult cachet of Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) to the fifth annual “Cine Excess” conference in May 2011, and Django himself will be in attendance! Guests of honour and veritable giants of cult Italian cinema Franco Nero and Ruggero Deodato will be the …

I shall be addressing the inaugural annual London Film and Media conference – Film and Media 2011 – in July, giving a talk about Robert Rodriguez’s latest film Machete (2010). The abstract is below, and I shall post more details forthwith.

Spaghetti Lefties: Postmodern Politics in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete
The confrontational political tone …

My latest article, ‘Go West, Comrade: Unearthing Politics in the Spaghetti Western’, has been published on the world’s foremost Euro Western fan site: the Spaghetti Western Database. I suggest therein that the political significance of the leftist Spaghettis that emerged in and around the era of protest (1966-1970) lies in their …

When Jean Baudrillard visited the USA, he wrote: ‘I was here in my imagination long before I actually came here’ (1988: 72). His words evoke an uncanny rendering of the culturally familiar, through the eyes of a European who has walked onto the world’s biggest movie set. Such a secondary experience of America was …