I’ll be addressing the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (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 …

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 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 …

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 …

My article, “Out West, Down South: Gazing at America in Reverse Shot through Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe?” (The Italianist, (30:2) 2010) is now available for all to read and download free of charge, should you so wish. You can download the article in pdf format here, or just read it here:

On Saturday September 18th 2010, I will be addressing “Kiss Kiss Kill Kill: A Symposium on the Forgotten Spy Film of Cold War Europe” at the University of Hertfordshire. My paper, “Chronicles of Lead: Transatlantic Flow in 1970s Italian Cop Thrillers”, will consider the poliziesco filone‘s significance as both a …

Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited by Iain Robert Smith, is now online. This exciting new eBook of original scholarship on processes of adaptation in film, television and new media is a special edition of the peer-reviewed journal Scope: an Online Journal of Film and TV Studies. It includes my …

“Society”, opines Reinhard Kolldehoff’s gleefully shady lawyer, “has many ways of defending itself: red tape, prison bars and the revolver”. His line serves a dual purpose. On a narrative level, it suggests to the key protagonist Vito Cipriani (Oliver Reed) the futility of resistance against the state apparatus facing him. …