Sarah Martindale
Horizon Research Fellow, Faculty of Science
Contact
Biography
I began my academic career at Queen Mary, University of London where I gained a First Class honours degree in English and was awarded the Westfield Trust Prize for Outstanding Academic Achievement. I remained there to study for an MA in Film and Communication Studies, passing with Distinction, before moving to Aberystwyth University to pursue a doctoral project concerning the relationship between film and the status of 'Shakespeare' as a cultural phenomenon, which involved conducting audience research under the supervision of Professor Martin Barker. My postgraduate studies were facilitated by two AHRC awards. Material from my PhD thesis has been published in Shakespeare Bulletin and English Drama Media, with more outputs in progress. I took up my post at Horizon Digital Economy Research in January 2011, contributing my knowledge of media texts and industries and audience research methodologies to interdisciplinary projects investigating the impact of technological innovations on television content and audience interactions with that content.
Expertise Summary
My training, teaching and research has encompassed a wide range of texts, critical perspectives and methodologies. Within this framework of diverse interests and experience I particularly focus on the relationship between people's individual cultural choices and broader taste patterns and attitudes, analysing intertextual connections, contextual factors and audience responses in order to unpack the implications of cultural hierarchies.
Teaching Summary
I previously taught in a part time capacity at Aberystwyth University in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies and the Language and Learning Centre. Teaching on a total of sixteen… read more
Research Summary
Vicarious
This project is exploring the potential for integrating biomedical data into television formats in order to provide the viewer with additional information about how on-screen protagonists are feeling and therefore enable greater emotional engagement with that experience. My role involves examining television genres, production processes, ethics and aesthetics alongside audience interpretations of and responses to biomedical data.
More information about this project can be found at: http://www.horizon.ac.uk/Current-Projects/Vicarious
Exploring Multi-Screen Household Ecologies
As domestic screen technologies multiply (the traditional television set joined by games consoles, laptops, tablets and smartphones) so people's relationships with visual media become increasingly dispersed and consequently harder to access and explore. This project sets out to capture and map the complexity of the interactions between individuals, technologies and content which take place in multi-screen environments. A combination of innovative digital observation techniques and audience research methods will be used to collect data about devices, routines and attitudes from households, with the ultimate aim of producing a toolkit for monitoring and making sense of changes in patterns of everyday cultural consumption.
Recent Publications
MARTINDALE, SARAH, 2008. Film Review: She's the Man Shakespeare Bulletin. 26(2), 135-8
MARTINDALE, SARAH, 2008. Shakespeare on Film: Viewing Shakespeare Inside the Classroom and Out English Drama Media. 19-22
I previously taught in a part time capacity at Aberystwyth University in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies and the Language and Learning Centre. Teaching on a total of sixteen different courses means that I have undertaken a wide variety of responsibilities, acting variously as a marker, seminar tutor, special subject tutor, lecturer, dissertation supervisor and module coordinator.
I have explored many topics in my teaching, including a number of different media (e.g. film, television and theatre), theoretical frameworks (e.g. cultural identity and intertextuality), historical periods (e.g. classical and contemporary Hollywood) and methodologies (e.g. textual analysis, reception studies and audience research). In doing so I have utilised a number of assessment techniques (e.g. essays, exams, presentations, portfolios, group projects and continuous assessment), and worked with a diverse range of students at foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Although my current position is a research role I have had the opportunity to contribute to a specialist session on audience research at the Horizon Doctoral Training Centre.
Past Research
PhD: An investigation of the status of 'Shakespeare', and the ways in which this is manifested in audience responses, with specific reference to three late-1990s Shakespearean films.
My academic background is inter-disciplinary and my doctoral project stemmed from my interest in different types of texts and their interrelationships, enabling me to study Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon by applying the theories and methods that I encountered through the communication studies element of my MA programme. Working within the cultural studies tradition of investigating the role of media in everyday life, the aim was to access and examine people's attitudes towards and experiences of Shakespeare by undertaking empirical audience research. This took the form of two online questionnaires, one for secondary school teachers of Shakespeare and the other for English and/or media undergraduates. The purpose of eliciting information from these particular groups was to investigate education as a point of potential tension in the cultural transmission of Shakespeare, accessing both sides of the pedagogic experience. The findings produced insights into the ways in which the cultural currency of Shakespeare is transformed by contemporary media, creating a disjunction with conventional evaluative criteria. Further information about this project can be found at: http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/handle/2160/6126
Future Research
In addition to evolving media forms and audience engagement with those forms, I am also interested in the construction of cultural identity and will be exploring this in work analysing the landscape of the British past in Shakespeare in Love (Madden, 1998) and the representation of Irishness in In Bruges (McDonagh, 2008).
MARTINDALE, SARAH, 2008. Film Review: She's the Man Shakespeare Bulletin. 26(2), 135-8
MARTINDALE, SARAH, 2008. Shakespeare on Film: Viewing Shakespeare Inside the Classroom and Out English Drama Media. 19-22