Ian Brookes
University Teacher in Culture, Film and Media, Faculty of Arts
Contact
Teaching Summary
I teach on several modules in the Department and I'm interested in a wide range of teaching and learning issues including working with international students and widening participation. One area of… read more
Research Summary
My research interests include Hollywood in the studio era; the racial politics of American culture; film and television genres, especially film noir and the musical; adaptation studies; American… read more
I teach on several modules in the Department and I'm interested in a wide range of teaching and learning issues including working with international students and widening participation. One area of module design I have been developing recently is on Interrogating Practice. This module is designed to raise questions about the practice of contemporary writing about film and television. Here, students investigate how traditional kinds of writing about film have changed in the age of the internet and the development of blogging culture. I'm also interested in the development of alternative kinds of module assignment to the traditional academic essay and here, for example, students are collectively involved in the production of writing as digital text which forms part of a themed small-group project designed as a blog.
Current Research
My research interests include Hollywood in the studio era; the racial politics of American culture; film and television genres, especially film noir and the musical; adaptation studies; American culture and society in World War II; postwar British and American culture; jazz and popular music history. One key area of interest for me here is in the visual dimension of music and the idea, as Arthur Knight put it, that "What music looks like relates crucially to how it sounds and what it can mean." One specific area of my research concerns the racial politics of musical performance where the look of music, from the Hollywood musical to MTV, can play a significant role in its meaning.
My recent publications include the following:
- "'A Rebus of Democratic Slants and Angles': To Have and Have Not, Racial Representation, and Musical Performance in a Democracy at War" in Graham Lock and David Murray, eds., Thriving On a Riff: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Literature and Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 203-220.
- "'All the Rest Is Propaganda:' Reading the Paratexts of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" in Adaptation: The Journal Of Literature and Screen Studies 2:1 (2009) 17-33.
- "The Eye of Power: Postwar Fordism and the Panoptic Corporation in The Apartment" in Journal of Popular Film and Television 37:4 (2009) 150-60.
Recent shorter articles include:
"All the King's Men" and "Dolly Parton" in Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith, eds., The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Media (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) pp. 185-6, 330-1.
I've also contributed several entries to The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd edition) on American composers and songwriters, jazz musicians, record labels, and film-related subjects (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2012).
I'm currently working on an edited collection of essays on Howard Hawks.