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 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, …

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 …

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) is, from a multitude of perspectives, a book-end. If Owen Wister is said to have spawned the Western genre (in fact a slightly spurious claim, given the multifarious incarnations of the myth in popular culture prior to The Virginian), Cimino is widely credited as its …

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 …

At first sight, Grant Heslov’s latest offering The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) resides alongside the whimsical fantasia of an earlier McGregor outing, Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003): the picaresque adventures of a little guy in a mysterious dream world. There is, however, more to this film than such a …