I am a lecturer in Media Arts at the University of Bedfordshire. I have a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, and am disseminating my research to the wider academic community using various media – including this one. I also hold an MA in Literature, Culture and Modernity from Queen Mary, University of London and a BA in English from the University of Birmingham.

My research interests include transcultural and cult cinemas, the Western, cinematic violence, postmodernism, the films of Quentin Tarantino and various attributions of “political” cinema. I welcome approaches from research students interested in these and related areas.

My main area of expertise concerns popular Italian cinema’s engagement with the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and my research in this field appears in The Italianist, The Blackwell Companion to Italian Cinema and Scope: an Online Journal of Film and TV Studies. I am now working on a history of exploitation cinema, and a project about the politics of violence in the Italian police thriller (“poliziesco”). I disseminate elements of my research both through both this blog and my Twitter feed (@austinjfisher).

My doctoral research and subsequent book both analyse militant appropriations of the Italian, or “Spaghetti”, Western which occurred around the time of the 1968 protest movements. I show how the codes of the Hollywood Western were adapted and re-inscribed with radically oppositional doctrine, and explore the relation between these films’ advocacy of insurgent violence and the eventual outbreak of terrorism in 1970s Italy.

Recent and forthcoming talks include a Q&A at the Irish Film Institute, a guest lecture at the University of Tennessee, and papers at both the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference in Boston and MeCCSA 2012 at Bedfordshire.

Teaching Profile:
• Course Leader: MA International Cinema
• Unit Leader: Film Analysis (MA)
• Unit Leader: Representation and Reality (MA)
• Unit Leader: Reading Hollywood (BA)
• Tutor: European Cinema After 1945 (MA)

If you would like to contact me, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of any page on this site. Alternatively, you can get in touch using the email address below: