Participants

Cüneyt Çakırlar is Associate Professor in Film & Visual Culture at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His research focuses on transnational sexuality studies and cross-cultural mobility of contemporary art practices. Çakırlar has taught on queer aesthetics and film theory at UCL, Boğaziçi University, and Istanbul Bilgi University. His articles appeared in various journals including Critical Arts, Paragraph, Cineaction, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Screen. He co-edited a volume about cultures of queer dissidence in contemporary Turkey, titled Cinsellik Muamması (2012), and co-translated Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993) into Turkish (2014). Çakırlar is the principal investigator of this project sponsored by the British Academy. As part of this project, he will be studying post-millennial emergence of the djinn in Turkish horror movies – with particular focus on gender, secular/post-secular publics, and religion-folklore syncretism in Turkey.

Professor Adam Lowenstein is the author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema and the Modern Horror Film (2005) and Horror Film and Otherness (Columbia University Press, forthcoming in 2022). Lowenstein serves as the Faculty Fellow for the horror studies scholar community through Pitt’s University Honors College, and as a founder of the Global Horror Studies Archival and Research Network through Pitt’s Global Studies Center. He played a central role in the acquisition of the George A. Romero Collection for Pittsburgh’s Horror Studies Archive. Lowenstein has agreed to act as Çakırlar’s mentor during the course of his project and to host him as the guest scholar in the horror studies networks during his research trip to Pittsburgh.

Born in Istanbul, Kerem Ayan studied film at the Ecole Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle and Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7. He worked in the Radio France Internationale for four years. He started working for the Cannes Film Festival in 2001 and meanwhile, organized the International Literary Adaptation Market in Monaco. In 2005, he launched the Political Films Festival in Barcelona and directed it for three years. In 2006, he became Assistant Director of the Istanbul Film Festival where he became Director in 2015. Working closely with Ayan, Çakırlar will be curating a series of horror film screenings for the next Istanbul Film Festival in April 2022.

Senem Aytaç is the Project Co-ordinator of the film magazine Altyazı. Along with the magazine’s editors-in-chief, Ms Aytaç has agreed to work closely with Çakırlar on the folk horror dossier to be published in the magazine next spring (2022). Altyazı has been Turkey’s leading film magazine since 2001, championing cinephile culture and promoting independent filmmaking. Starting its life under the aegis of Bogaziçi University, Altyazı became fully independent in March 2019 and evolved into a non-profit NGO (namely, Altyazı Cinema Association), advocating freedom of expression and democratic values in the field of cinema. As an independent film magazine and an essential online platform, Altyazı’s mission in the contemporary media landscape in Turkey is two-fold. Firstly, offering original and critical content on national and international film culture has been a priority of Altyazı as a film magazine since its foundation. Secondly, on a broader level, Altyazı Cinema Association as an NGO actively cooperates with filmmakers, critics, cinephiles, festivals, and other civil society organisations to strengthen their critical voices for a more democratic cultural scene.

Shakuntala Banaji is Professor of Media, Culture and Social Change at London School of Economics. Professor Banaji lectures on International Media and the Global South, film theory and world cinema, and critical approaches to media, communication and development. She has published extensively on youth, children and media as well as gender, ethnicity and new media and cinema. Her areas of expertise include South Asian horror films and their reception.

Benjamin Bigelow is Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities, where he teaches courses on crime fiction, contemporary Nordic cultures, environmental humanities, film historiography, and horror cinema. He is also actively involved in the Moving Image, Media and Sound Studies program as affiliate faculty, as well as the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the University of Minnesota. He has recently completed a book manuscript on environmental horror entitled “Bloody Environments: Ecohorror in Contemporary Nordic Cinema.” He has also published articles and chapters on questions of memory, spectatorship, and eco-materialism in contemporary Scandinavian film; early sound film and the aesthetics of off-screen space; and vital materialism in Nordic literary cultures. His current research project is a monograph on vitalism, body discourses, and mediations of the invisible in early twentieth-century Nordic cultures.

David Scott Diffrient is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. He is the co-editor of Screwball Television: Critical Perspectives on Gilmore Girls (Syracuse University Press, 2010) and East Asian Film Remakes (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) as well as the author of M*A*S*H (Wayne State University Press, 2008), Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters: Bad Behavior on American Television (Syracuse University Press, 2022), Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film (University Press of Mississippi, 2023), and (with coauthor Hye Seung Chung) Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2015) and Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2021).

Kate Egan is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at Northumbria University. Prior to this, she taught at Aberystwyth University and Nottingham University, where she was awarded her PhD on the cultural history of the video nasties in 2005. She is the author of Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (MUP, 2007) and Cultographies: The Evil Dead (Wallflower, 2011), and co-author of Alien Audiences(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She is also the co-editor of Cult Film Stardom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), And Now for Something Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python (EUP, 2020), and Researching Historical Screen Audiences (EUP, 2022). She has also published in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections on topics such as Japanese horror, Alien and its sequels, and audience memories of horror cinema, and is the co-founder of the BAFTSS Horror Studies SIG. 

Jacob Engelberg is a doctoral candidate in Film Studies at King’s College London, where he is researching bisexual transgression in cinema between the 1970s and the 1990s. He has published articles in the Journal of Bisexuality and Porn Studies, where he will be editing a special issue on the theme of bisexuality and porn film. Jacob has forthcoming chapters on adult film, the sex scene, Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face (1976), and Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017). He is the Graduate Student Representative of the SCMS Queer and Trans Caucus and he sits on the advisory board of Routledge’s Screening Film series. Jacob’s research interests include film history, film theory, queer and bisexual theory, silent cinema, and Jewishness on film. For this project, Jacob will be studying dybbuk-themed films.

Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. She is co-author with Karl Schoonover of Queer Cinema in the World (Duke UP, 2016), coeditor of Global Art Cinema (Oxford UP, 2010), and author of Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (Columbia UP, 2010) and The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (Columbia UP, 2006). Galt’s research is situated at the intersection of film theories and histories, locating world cinemas within debates on visuality and aesthetics, postcoloniality and globality, sexuality and the politics of the image. Her most recent book, Alluring Monsters: the Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (Columbia University Press, 2021) explores how a female vampire figure from Malay animism re-emerged in popular cinema, and argues that this pre-colonial, often transgressive figure can reframe anticolonial aesthetics and world cinema. Her research addresses world cinema from a queer and feminist perspective and is particularly interested in the transnational intersections of sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics.

Lindsay Hallam is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of East London. She is author of the books Screening the Marquis de Sade: Pleasure, Pain and the Transgressive Body in Film, and the Devil’s Advocate edition on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. She is interested in all aspects of horror cinema, having written on topics such as female vampires, torture porn and post-9/11 trauma, mad science films, Italian horror, Australian eco-horror, and the television series Twin Peaks.

Chris Holmlund is Professor Emerita of of Cinema Studies, Women’s/Sexuality/Gender Studies and French at University of Tennessee, USA. Her areas of specialism include US independent film, action film, film genres, Swedish film and media, French/francophone film, Latin American/Latinx film and video, global and transnational film, and documentary. Holmlund has long been interested in Swedish films, from children’s shows to experimental work to thrillers, and now to horror. Her books include Female Trouble (2017) and Impossible Bodies (2002). She edited The Ultimate Stallone Reader (2014) and American Cinema of the 1990s (2008) and co-edited Contemporary American Independent Film (2005) and Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary (1997). She is working on a book on Action Films, Action Stars.

Alicia Izharuddin is Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the Faculty of the Arts and Social Sciences, University of Malaya (Malaysia) and Research Associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program in the Harvard Divinity School, 2019-2021 (USA). She received her PhD in gender studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK, in 2014. She conducts research from a feminist perspective on the relationship between Islam, gender, and sexuality in modern Indonesia and Malaysia. Aside from writing articles on gender, Islam and film studies, she has authored a book titled, Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema, published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2017.

Zahra Khosroshahi is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at University of Glasgow. She is currently working on her forthcoming monograph Iranian Women Filmmakers: A Cinema of Resistance (Edinburgh University Press). Zahra’s research explores how film challenges systems of power, and how filmmaking specifically functions as a form of resistance in Iran.  Zahra’s work also considers the role and influence of Iranian cinema on the global stage. Her other areas of research include feminist theory, women filmmakers, world cinema, and representation. Her publications appeared in various journals including Feminist Media Studies, Frames Cinema Journal, and Feminist Media Histories. 

Nikki J.Y. Lee is Senior Lecturer in Asian Media at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), UK. Lee studied Sociology at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. She obtained MA in TV Documentary and PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. She had taught at Yonsei University and Korea National University of Arts, in Seoul, before she moved back to the UK and started her post at NTU. At NTU, she mainly teaches on Asian media and cinema; and documentary. Her current research focuses on Korean film industry and screen cultures, film sound and food media. Apart from her professional career as an academic, she worked as an independent documentary-maker; as an interpreter and translator for film-related events and media; and was involved in launching the first London Korean film festival in 2001.

Bliss Cua Lim is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique (2009) and a member of the Editorial Collective of the journal, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies and the Advisory Board of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication. Her next book, The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (forthcoming from Duke University Press), analyzes the crisis-ridden history of film archiving in the Philippines. In addition to her book, Translating Time, her work on Asian horror cinema appears in A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, the journal Kritika Kultura, and Red Pepper magazine.

Adrian Martin is an arts critic, lecturer and audiovisual essayist based in Spain. He is Adjunct Professor of Film and Screen Studies, Monash University (Australia). He is the author of Certain Dark Corners of Modern Cinema (Contra Mundum, forthcoming), Filmmakers Thinking (EQZE, 2022), Mysteries of Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018 & University of Western Australia Publishing, 2020), Mise en scène and Film Style (Palgrave, 2014), Last Day Every Day (Punctum, English, Portuguese and Spanish editions 2012-2015), ¿Qué es el cine moderno? (Uqbar, 2008), The Mad Max Movies (Currency, 2003), Once Upon a Time in America (BFI, 1998) and Phantasms (Currency, 1994). An open access archive covering over 40 years of his work is at http://www.filmcritic.com.au, and this ongoing project can be supported at www.patreon.com/adrianmartin.

Professor David McNally is the NEH-Cullen Chair in History and Business at the University of Houston, where he directs a project on Race and Capitalism. He specializes in the history and political economy of capitalism. The author of seven books and over 60 scholarly articles, Professor McNally taught political economy at York University in Toronto before joining the Department of History at the University of Houston. His research has addressed issues of race, migration, gender and social reproduction in the development of global capitalism. Professor McNally has won the Paul Sweezy Award for his book, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (2010), and the Deutscher Memorial Award for Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2011). His latest book, Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire (2020) is now being translated into German.

Gary Needham is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Liverpool, UK. His publications include Brokeback Mountain (2010) and the co-edited collections Asian Cinemas (2006), Queer TV (2009), and Warhol in Ten Takes (2010). He is currently co-editor of The Routledge Hollywood Centenary series and editor of the Screening Film series. His two forthcoming monographs are Factory Films: Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and the New American Cinema and Sex, Guys, and Videotape (on gay independent filmmaking in the US). His research also explores Asian horror, particularly in Hong Kong cinema. 

Gözde Onaran has been an editorial board member and writer at Altyazı Cinema Magazine since 2006. She received her MA in Media Ecology and Filmmaking from New York University (NYU), and her PhD from The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Her dissertation escaping entrapment: gothic heroines in contemporary film focuses on films that revisit the Female Gothic genre and offer an escape route out of the gothic nightmare for their female heroines. 

Vlad Strukov is Associate Professor in Film and Digital Culture at University of Leeds, UK, and a researcher at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia). Strukov is a London-based researcher, curator, and cultural practitioner, specializing in art, media, and technology cross-overs. He is currently carrying out a major research project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, on contemporary queer visual culture. He is the author of many research publications, including a monograph on contemporary Russian cinema (EUP 2016). His current area of research includes Russian genre film, particularly the regional horror productions from Yakutia.

Iain Robert Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, UK. He is author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (EUP, 2016) and co-editor of the collections Transnational Film Remakes (with Constantine Verevis, EUP, 2017) and Media Across Borders (with Andrea Esser and Miguel Bernal-Merino, Routledge, 2016). He co-founded the SCMS Transnational Cinemas SIG and he is currently working on a research project to ‘De-Westernize Cult Film Studies’.

Gustavo Subero is Lecturer in Visual Cultures and Science Humanities at the Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication, Imperial College London, UK. Most of Subero’s work centres on the cultures of the Global South and looks at the ways in which non-Western societies experience globalisation (especially issues around race, gender, citizenship and intersectionality). He is the author of Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Horror Cinema: Embodiments of Evil (2018) and Queer Masculinity in Latin American Cinema: Male Bodies and Narrative Representations (2013). His areas of expertise include Latin American filmmaking, gender/sexuality studies, and exploitation cinemas.

Johnny Walker is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University, UK. As of September 2021, he is the Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded Fellowship: Raising Hell: British Horror Film of the 1980s and 1990s. He is the author of Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1978-92 (2022) and Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (2015). He is the co-editor of  Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (2021), and Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (2016). His scholarship has appeared in leading journals such as the New Review of Film and Television Studies (2022), the Journal of Popular Culture (2022), the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (2017), the Journal of British Cinema and Television (2012, 2015), and Horror Studies (2011), as well as in books such as Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema (2014), and Italian Horror Cinema (2016).

Zeynep Serinkaya Winter is a freelance translator and a doctoral student in Media Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She completed her master’s degree in the Comparative Studies in History and Society programme at Koç University (Istanbul, Turkey). Her MA thesis, “The Disability Metaphor and The Construction of the Norm in Yeşilçam Melodramas”, explores how the popular reiterations of the disability tropes relate to the construction of Turkish national identity through images of gender and sexuality in popular Turkish films in 1960-1980. Her current doctoral project focuses on changing audience identifications with Yeşilçam through digital media under growing authoritarianism and censorship in Turkey. She has also been actively involved in civil society work and she worked as a translator for LGBTI News Turkey, where she has contributed as a writer.