Professor Claire Monk

Job: Professor of Film & Film Culture

Faculty: Computing, Engineering and Media

School/department: Leicester Media School

Research group(s): Cinema and Television History Centre (CATH), Centre for Adaptations

Address: De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, UK, LE1 9BH

T: n/a

E: cmonk@dmu.ac.uk

W: http://dmu.academia.edu/ClaireMonk

 

Personal profile

My core field is the cultural, socio-political and contextual understanding of contemporary British film and film culture since the 1970s, spanning films with both period and contemporary settings – including bringing the perspectives and insights of audiences and fans into debates which have historically excluded them. I am know especially for:

(i) My contributions since the mid-1990s to the debates around the cultural politics of the ‘heritage film’ (defined by Richard Dyer as 'a text set in the past’, often ‘drawing upon a canonical source’, and ‘comprised of period costumes, decor and locations carefully recreated’). Recently, I’ve been called a ‘key voice’ in the shaping of these debates. Read more in a 2013 interview about my work in this area here: http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/screeningeuropeanheritage/956

(ii) My wider socially and contextually situated work on contemporary representations in British film, 1990–present, with particular reference to the politics – cultural, socio-economic, sexual and representational – of the Thatcher and Blair eras. Here, my interests encompass class, gender, sexuality and their intersections; shifting social realisms; transnational representations and directors within British cinema (e.g. Pawel Pawlikowski); socio-economic, historical, urban and regional geographies and questions of place; and discourses and representations of regeneration and decline.

(iii) Other interests include ‘pre-heritage’ British period cinema and TV drama in long 1970s; 1970s–1980s punk and post-punk music cultures and their impacts on British film; post-2000 trends in the ‘retro’ or historical representation of recent, late-20th-century decades in film and media in convergence with wider cultural, music and style trends; and new trends in the mediated representation of history/‘the past’ considered in relation to digitised archives and social media.

My research and publications across this spectrum contributed to DMU’s world-class research submissions to RAE2001 (UoA65), RAE2008 (UoA66), and our outstanding triumph in REF2014 (UoA36), in which we were ranked No. 1 in the UK in our subject area for 4*/world-leading outputs, and joint 1st in the UK for impact. I am always happy to hear from prospective PhD students seeking supervision in my fields of expertise.

My work on ‘heritage cinema’ (and especially the films of Merchant Ivory Productions) has been driven by a commitment to focusing attention on questions of gender, sexuality and pleasure, in a counterpoint to the overemphasis on nostalgia and ‘ideologies of Englishness’ which dominated the most influential critiques of these films from the early 1990s onwards.

My more recent work has returned to ‘heritage films’ as viewed from the perspectives of real audiences and fans: represented in the monograph Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK (Edinburgh University Press, HB 2011, PB 2012) – to date, the only detailed empirical study of audience perspectives on heritage films or heritage culture – and its refereed-journal sequel ‘Heritage Film Audiences 2.0’, which explores the forms and implications of (time-shifted, transnational) 21st-century online fandom and fan productivity, centrally around Ivory’s E. M. Forster adaptations Maurice (1987) and A Room With A View (1985

In my work in progress, I’m increasingly interested in the connections and parallels between these perspectives and the insights yielded by textual histories and production studies.

In 2012, I was one of only 26 UK academics – and 9 UK female academics – then below Professor or Emeritus level invited to contribute to Sight & Sound’s famous once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time Poll of leading critics and filmmakers worldwide.

Research group affiliations

  • Cinema and Television History Centre (CATH)
  • Centre for Adaptations

Publications and outputs

  • ‘But you know, there have been queer characters from the very first film’: Call Me by Your Name and the long shadow of James Ivory
    dc.title: ‘But you know, there have been queer characters from the very first film’: Call Me by Your Name and the long shadow of James Ivory dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: The imprint of the veteran gay independent director James Ivory on Call Me by Your Name is fundamental: not merely as the 2017 film’s Academy Award-winning credited screenwriter, but via Ivory’s intimate involvement from 2007 onwards when the rights to André Aciman’s novel were first optioned. This chapter explores the contours of Ivory’s influence on Call Me by Your Name in cinematic–authorial and production–strategic terms to situate Call Me by Your Name’s remarkable 21st-century impact as LGBTQ+ cinema and same-sex romance in relation to Ivory’s longer and wider film oeuvre and to Merchant Ivory Productions’ collaborative, representational and promotional practices in their 44 years as a (widely and wilfully unacknowledged) queer filmmaking partnership. The chapter, firstly, offers a new, nuanced reading of Call Me by Your Name’s affinities with Ivory’s long-underrated affirmative gay film Maurice (1987), adapted from E. M. Forster’s posthumous 1971 novel – questioning viral social-media assertions about the ‘parallels’ between the two films which proliferated amid the rising 2017–2018 hype around the film – and, secondly, establishes Call Me by Your Name’s place and cinematic precursors within Ivory’s wider, less-known body of work beyond the ‘heritage film’ mode between 1963 and 2009, focusing particularly on Ivory’s films Slaves of New York (1988), A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998) and The City of Your Final Destination (2009). Thirdly, drawing on archive and wider primary sources, the chapter establishes the senses in which Call Me by Your Name’s exceptional crossover success owed a debt to the innovative promotional and release strategies which had been rehearsed three decades earlier in the release of Merchant Ivory’s Maurice.
  • Forster and adaptation: across time, media and methodologies
    dc.title: Forster and adaptation: across time, media and methodologies dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: This essay advances the conversation around the subject of (E. M. Forster and adaptation – or Forsterian adaptation – by appraising the current state of Forster/ian adaptations scholarship and proposing conceptual and methodological tools for advancing the study of this field. As a cross-disciplinary scholar of film, adaptation, literature, popular and critical reception, and digitally enabled participatory culture, I write with the more specific goal of heightening and extending transdisciplinary awareness of the materials available to be studied, the available methodologies, and their merits and limitations, while identifying issues and challenges for the development of a Forster/ian Adaptation Studies. Structurally, the essay proceeds by identifying ten ‘themes’ – or important considerations – for the study of Forster/ian adaptation. The ten themes look substantially beyond ‘page-to-screen’ adaptation studies to demonstrate the roles and impacts of institutions, institutional practices, personal relations, the successive ‘new’ media of the past century and their advancing technologies and practices, commercial forces, and Forster’s literary estate (as the rights-holders and royalties beneficiaries for his works); while also calling for a closer, evidence-based, attention to film and media adaptation and production processes and their adaptational consequences; and foregrounding the importance of the visual and unscripted – performed, embodied, intangible and even accidental – elements and determinants of audio-visual adaptation. Temporally, the essay conceptualises the field of Forster/ian adaptations by proposing that there have been three phases of Forster/ian adaptation. Phase 1 (1942–1973) comprises those adaptations of Forster’s stories and novels written and produced (broadly) during his lifetime, always for non-cinematic media. Phase 2 comprises the 1984–1992 era of the Forster feature-films cycle, instigated by a (widely disregarded) institutional shift which brought a step-change in the nature of Forster adaptation: for the first time, the development of new adaptations of Forster’s novels, going back to the source, became the norm. Phase 3 comprises everything that comes after the 1984–1992 Forster feature films, plus certain earlier adaptations which fall outside the ‘classic adaptation’ category. This third (and current) phase is characterised by its heterogeneity: adaptation to a range of media, across a range of forms and aesthetic approaches, by creators with varied interests, but, I propose, spanning four main areas: Sci-Fi Forster, Queer Forster, The Revisionist or Condescending Forster Adaptation, and twenty-first-century Forsterian Bio-Drama, Bio-Fiction and ‘Literary’ Paratexts. dc.description: Open access article
  • EMI and the ‘Pre-Heritage’ Period Film
    dc.title: EMI and the ‘Pre-Heritage’ Period Film dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: First coined in the UK in the early 1990s as a new label for an ostensibly new, post-1979 kind and cycle of period cinema, the ‘heritage film’ is now firmly established as a widely used term and category in academic film studies. Although the heritage film’s defining features, ideological character and ontological coherence would remain debated, its status as a ‘new’ category hinges, self-evidently, on the presumption that the films of post- 1979 culturally English heritage cinema marked a new departure and were clearly distinct from their pre-Thatcher-era precursors. Yet, paradoxically, the British period/costume films of the preceding decade, the 1970s, have attracted almost no scholarly attention, and none which connects them with the post- 1979 British heritage film, nor the 1980s cultural and industry conditions said to have fostered these productions. This article pursues these questions through the prism of Britain’s largest film production and distribution entity throughout 1970–86, EMI, and EMI’s place as a significant and sustained, but little-acknowledged, force in British period film production throughout that time. In so doing, the article establishes the case for studying ‘pre-heritage’ period cinema. EMI’s period film output included early proto-heritage films but also ventured notably wider. This field of production is examined within the broader terrain of 1970s British and American period cinema and within wider 1970s UK cinema box-office patterns and cultural trends, attending to commercial logics as well as to genre and the films’ positioning in relation to the later heritage film debates. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.
  • 'Maurice' Without Ending: From Forster's Palimpsest to Fan-Text
    dc.title: 'Maurice' Without Ending: From Forster's Palimpsest to Fan-Text dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: During their ongoing lives, both E. M. Forster’s gay bildungsroman/romance ‘Maurice’ (written 1913–14, repeatedly revised 1914–1959, posthumously published 1971) and Merchant Ivory Productions’ eponymous 1987 film adaptation have suffered parallel forms of critical dismissal and misrecognition. Both novel and film have been received in terms that dismiss them as works worthy of analysis and deny their cultural, political and affective significance: whether as the first gay love story to deliver an ‘imperative’ happy ending, or as the radical Utopian, visionary queer text Forster’s – open, un‐‘finished’ – ending encodes. Where 1970s critics marginalised Forster’s ‘Maurice’ by dismissing it as an ‘inferior’ work or ‘fairytale’, the dominant critical response to James Ivory’s ‘Maurice’ in the UK would stubbornly pigeonhole and dismiss it as merely a ‘heritage film’ – a stance epitomised in Mark Finch and Richard Kwietniowski’s perverse insistence that Ivory’s ‘Maurice’ is ‘fourthly, and only fourthly, about le vice anglais’ (1988:72). In the early twenty-first century, however, such responses are challenged by the enduring and profound impact of both novel and film on audiences/readers, whose intense responses to ‘Maurice’ are vividly evident in post‐2000 Web 2.0 participatory culture (Monk, 2011b). This chapter instigates and nests within a larger project of reappraising ‘Maurice’’s evolution and adaptation(s) across three phases of its century-long (trans)textual history, including its still-unfolding twenty-first century adaptations and its popular reception and uses in its ongoing public life. First, the complex, palimpsestic history of ‘Maurice’ ‘the’ novel between 1913-14 and 1971: the product of 57 years of private circulation, and intermittent but protracted textual revisions, during which divergent manuscripts were read by multiple ‘peer reviewers’. Second, the 1987 film adaptation, which was the product of a comparably complicated, contested genesis and significant structural reworking (made publicly part-visible for the first time in the 2004 release of the Merchant Ivory Collection DVD, with its 30‐plus minutes of unused or deleted scenes, and in the subsequent Blu-ray/DVD releases of the film’s 30th-anniversary digital restoration since 2017: see Monk, 2017 and 2019). The third phase comprises the responses of ‘Maurice’’s twenty-first-century readers/audiences and fans, which take a variety of forms – some merely made newly visible by twenty-first-century participatory digital and internet culture; others directly enabled, stimulated, or shaped by it – and also the further adaptations, re-adaptations and paratexts of Maurice (Forster’s, Ivory’s, or blurring the two) which have emerged or been made during the same period. These include a great variety of post‐2000 (re‐)adaptations and sequels written by fans themselves, whether published online or in print (within a wider body of ‘Maurice’ fanworks such a pop videos and crossover fictions: see Monk, 2011b). Since 2004, more than 160 fan-authored ‘Maurice’ fictions (including sequels, and crossovers which mix characters and/or story elements from more than one text/fandom) have been published online in English (as well as more than 30 in Russian and some in other languages). These works are of interest not merely for the insights they offer into reader/fan understandings of and investments in ‘Maurice’, but for the work done by fans in extending Forster’s sexual politics and Utopian vision – as well as the Maurice Hall/Alec Scudder cross-class pairing – into ‘the for ever and ever that fiction allows’ (Forster, 1960/1972, p.218), and in their narrative and representational solutions to perceived difficulties or limitations within the novel and/or film.
  • An Interview with James Wilby by Claire Monk (16 March 2017)
    dc.title: An Interview with James Wilby by Claire Monk (16 March 2017) dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: A new 3,651-word interview with James Wilby – the leading actor (Joint Best Actor, Venice Film Festival, 1987) of James Ivory’s/Merchant Ivory Productions’ landmark gay Edwardian period drama/romance Maurice, adapted from the posthumous 1971 novel by E. M. Forster – conducted for the Blu-ray edition of the film’s 30th-anniversary digital restoration by the Cohen Media Group, overseen by the film’s veteran director James Ivory (also the 2018 Academy Award-winner for Best Adapted Screenplay) and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme. The 2017 30th Anniversary Blu-ray is the film’s first-ever release on Blu-ray. The Maurice restoration was also cinematically released in the USA during Spring–Autumn 2017. The interview drew upon Monk’s two decades of expertise as one of the foremost scholars of ‘heritage’ literary adaptations, Forster adaptations, and Ivory’s body of work as a filmmaker, and was distinctively informed by archive research in Ivory’s production papers for Maurice held at the University of Oregon, USA. published in the Blu-ray booklet, pp.6–8 & 11–14.
  • Maurice, and complementary entry on E. M. Forster
    dc.title: Maurice, and complementary entry on E. M. Forster dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: (i) Chapter on E. M. Forster’s posthumous novel Maurice and the development and production complexities of its 1987 film adaptation by Merchant Ivory Productions (directed by James Ivory) for the first volume in a large multi-volume reference work, and (ii) the accompanying entry on the source author E. M. Forster and the history of adaptations of his works across multiple media (not solely the 1980s–1990s Forster feature films). 5,071 words in total.
  • It was a movie we all felt strongly about, because nobody really wanted us to make it: 30 Years of James Ivory’s Maurice (1987): An Inaugural Lecture by Professor Claire Monk
    dc.title: It was a movie we all felt strongly about, because nobody really wanted us to make it: 30 Years of James Ivory’s Maurice (1987): An Inaugural Lecture by Professor Claire Monk dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: Professorial Inaugural Lecture: A public talk delivered as part of DMU Pride Month 2018. Professor Monk’s inaugural lecture reflected on the production and reception history of James Ivory’s Edwardian gay male romance Maurice (1987), adapted from E. M. Forster’s novel of the same title by the renowned international Merchant Ivory Productions partnership. Their film celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2017 and is now recognised as an LGBTQ+ film classic. Ivory’s Maurice was the first affirmative mainstream gay film. Even today, following a decade of big-screen breakthroughs such as Brokeback Mountain, Carol and Moonlight, it remains one of very few LGBTQ+ films to reward its hero with a happy ending. And, unlike these US examples, Maurice was made in the UK, on a tiny budget, in the mid-1980s at the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis. It reached British cinemas as the Thatcher Government’s most virulent anti-gay legislation, the notorious Section 28, was brewing. During Maurice’s production and after, Ivory and Merchant for the most part played down the challenges they faced – but nonetheless, much of the detail of the film’s production, release and reception which emerges from published sources and Ivory’s production files indicates that it was a film made and released against numerous odds. ‘It was a movie we all felt strongly about, because nobody really wanted us to make it,’ Ivory said in 2012 (Ouzounian, Toronto Star, 21 June). Drawing on insights from her 20-year career as a specialist in British cinema and its reception, and new research in Ivory’s own production archives, Professor Monk’s lecture explored the behind-the-scenes story of this landmark film. What was it like to make and release a gay film classic – and classic gay ‘heritage’ literary adaptation – in the 1980s? Ten days after this lecture was delivered, Ivory became, at 89, the oldest Academy Award-winner in history, winning the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the male same-sex coming-of-age romance Call Me By Your Name.
  • From ‘English’ heritage to transnational audiences: fan perspectives and practices and why they matter
    dc.title: From ‘English’ heritage to transnational audiences: fan perspectives and practices and why they matter dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description.abstract: Despite the transnational character of the 21st-century film and entertainment industries, and the transformation of modes of consumption by the interlinked impacts of globalisation, digitisation, media convergence, social media and participatory culture, academic discourse around ‘heritage cinema’ has nonetheless persisted in framing it (however anachronistically) as a national ‘project’. The Screening European Heritage project, similarly, has pursued research questions that assert the key importance of heritage films within national and European film culture(s), and in supporting domestic film industries and the wider heritage and tourism sector at a national-cultural and nation-state level. As Andrew Higson correctly observes, however, ‘a great deal of what passes as (national) heritage cinema is actually the product of transnational, even global, markets’ (cited by Cooke and Stone, ‘Introduction’ to the current volume, 2016, xxxi). These ‘transnational circumstances’ are thrown into still sharper relief if we focus on the heritage film from the plural, unpredictable and surprising perspectives of transnational audiences and fans – from Europe and beyond. This chapter builds upon my earlier empirical engagements with real UK-based audiences of heritage cinema, and with the place of these films in internet-based fan cultures, to explore 21st-century transnational and transcultural fan discourses, understandings, and creative/participatory practices around Anglophone, ‘culturally British’ heritage films and their actors. Intriguingly and usefully, these fan engagements focus on, or intersect with, the same iconic ‘culturally English’ period-film texts of the 1980s that were cited and denounced in the founding early-1990s British critiques of the ‘heritage film’. Attention to 21st-century internet culture, however, reveals that these same films are consumed, appreciated, understood and (at times) (re-)appropriated by audiences and fans within markedly different generic, media, fannish and transtextual contexts that depart sharply from notions of ‘heritage cinema’ or narrowly national interpretative frameworks, and may even render them redundant. 21st-century global fan perspectives and practices around these films are transnational and even deterritorialised; but also trans-temporal and trans-generational; while focusing on films and actors which, and who, always were more transnational and ‘European’ than the 1990s debates which cast them as exemplars of ‘conservative English heritage’ were willing to concede. The culture of fandom itself shifts the consumption and interpretation of ‘English’ ‘heritage’ films further away from the ‘national’, since committed fans perceive fandom itself as (a, self-evidently, transnational and deterritorialised) ‘community’ in which pseudonymised interactions (which may strongly reveal or conceal nationality, region or other salient facets of identity) are the norm. And, with regards to the presumed relationship between heritage films and heritage tourism, some fan perspectives reveal a passionate interest in sites which remain uncommodified or even un-visitable in relation to the beloved film.
  • ‘The shadow of this time’: tradition and history, alchemy and multiplicity in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee
    dc.title: ‘The shadow of this time’: tradition and history, alchemy and multiplicity in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.
  • Pageantry and populism, democratization and dissent: the forgotten 1970s
    dc.title: Pageantry and populism, democratization and dissent: the forgotten 1970s dc.contributor.author: Monk, Claire

Click here for a full listing of Claire Monk's publications and outputs.

Key research outputs

Recent publications

‘Pageantry and populism, democratization and dissent: the forgotten 1970s’, in Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey, eds James Leggott & Julie Anne Taddeo (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield) 2014, pp.3-21. 

‘“The shadow of this time”: tradition and history, alchemy and multiplicity in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee‘, Shakespeare Bulletin: The Journal of Early Modern Drama in Performance (Johns Hopkins UP), 2014, 32:3, pp.359-373.

‘‘If you can’t make a good political film, don’t”: Pawel Pawlikowski’s resistant poetic realism’, Journal of British Cinema and Television (‘British Cinema and TV since 2000’ special issue), 2012, 9:3, pp.480-501.

Monograph 

Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK (Edinburgh: EUP), HB 2011 / PB 2012.

Shorter key publications

Heritage Film Audiences 2.0: period film audiences and online fan cultures', Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies , 2011, 8:3, pp.431-477.

‘Sexuality and heritage’, in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: British Film Institute) 2001, pp.6-11. Anthologised from original publication in Sight and Sound, Oct 1995, 5:10, pp.32-4.

‘Underbelly UK: the 1990s underclass film, masculinity and the ideologies of “New” Britain’, in British Cinema, Past and Present, eds Justine Ashby & Andrew Higson (London & New York: Routledge), 2000, pp.274-87.

‘The heritage film and gendered spectatorship’, CloseUp: The Electronic Journal of British Cinema, 1997, 1. Archived in two parts at: Part 1: http://web.archive.org/web/20150131163520/http://www.shu.ac.uk/services/lc/closeup/monk.htm and Part 2: http://web.archive.org/web/20150515020017/http://www.shu.ac.uk/services/lc/closeup/monk2.htm

Book as joint editor

Claire Monk & Amy Sargeant (eds) British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film (London & New York: Routledge), 2002.

Research interests/expertise

British Film, Film Culture & Criticism, Heritage Cinema, Heritage Culture, Period Films, Period TV Drama, Literature & Adaptations, Merchant Ivory Productions, James Ivory, E. M. Forster, Gender & Sexuality, Audience & Reception Studies, Fandom & Fan Productivity, History in Media, Women & Film, Punk & Post-Punk, Retro Culture & Consumption, all these areas in Social Media.

Areas of teaching

  • Contemporary British Cinema, Films and Film Culture
  • The Past on Film: Period Film Genres and Historical Representation in Media
  • World Cinema

Qualifications

  • PhD (School of Arts: Research Studentship in Middlebrow Culture, Audiences and Taste, supervised by Professor Francis Mulhern), Middlesex University, UK, 2007. 
  • PGCert in Teaching and Learning in Adult and Higher Education, Birkbeck, University of London, UK, 1998.
  • MA with Distinction in Cinema and Television Studies, Birkbeck, University of London in association with the British Film Institute, UK, 1994.
  • BA Honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) (Exhibitioner), Balliol College, Oxford University, UK, 1986.

Courses taught

  • FILM2502 Contemporary British Cinema
  • FILM3404 The Past on Film
  • Formerly: FILM2007 & FILM2401 World Cinemas
  • PhD & MPhil supervisions
  • MRes (MA by Research) supervisions

Honours and awards

June 2016: Cinema & Television History (CATH) Research Centre, team winner of the DMU OSCAR Award for Outstanding Contribution to Research Excellence.

Membership of external committees

  • Women’s Film History Network UK & Ireland Steering Group, 2011–

Membership of professional associations and societies

  • AAS (International Association of Adaptation Studies), 2009–
  • ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Copyright Society), 2011–
  • BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies), 2012–
  • Fan Studies Network, 2012–
  • International E. M. Forster Society (by invitation), 2016–
  • MeCCSA (Media, Cultural and Communication Studies Association), 2006–

Conference attendance

Conferences and panels as organiser

Peer-review and hosting committee: Console-ing Passions: 21st International Conference on Television, Video, Audio, New Media and Feminism, DMU, 23-25 Jun 2013.

Panel organiser: ‘E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1913/1971) and 25 years of James Ivory’s Maurice (1987): adaptation(s), authorship(s) and reappraisal(s)’, 7th Annual Conference of the Association of Adaptation Studies (AAS): Visible and Invisible Authorships, University of York, UK, 27-28 Sep 2012.

Conference instigator and joint organiser: Adapting Historical Narratives Conference, DMU Centre for Adaptations, 28 Feb 2012.

Public event instigator/curator/organiser: African Classic Film Screening and Discussion: Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Badou Boy (1970), with panellists Professor Patrick Williams (Nottingham Trent University) and Lizelle Bisschoff (Director, Africa in Motion Film Festival), DMU Cultural Exchanges Festival 2010, 2 Mar 2010.

As keynote or other invited speaker

‘Messing with masculinities: Post-Thatcher British cinema’s other men since the 1990s’, Film After Thatcher: Gender and Sexuality in post-1990 British Cinema, Liverpool Hope University, UK, 2 Jul 2014. (Keynote)

‘“The shadow of this time”: tradition and history, alchemy and multiplicity in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)’, Early Modern Jarman Symposium, King’s College London, UK, 1 Feb 2014. Part of the year-long Jarman 2014 commemoration. (Invited speaker)

‘Heritage films and their audiences: fan perspectives and practices and why they matter’, Screening European Heritage, University of Leeds, 12-13 Sep 2013. An outcome of the AHRC-funded Screening European Heritage scoping study and network. (Keynote)

‘From Lypton Village to London Goth: Virgin Prunes in England, c. 1982-4’, A Special Relationship? Irish Popular Music in Britain, Northumbia University, UK, in conjunction with the University of Ulster Centre for Media Research, 27-8 June 2012 (Invited plenary speaker)

‘Web 2.0 fandom and James Ivory’s/E. M. Forster’s Maurice (UK, 1987) – or: Tumblr, LiveJournal and YouTube, the life of texts and the redundancy of “heritage-film” criticism’, Pursuing the Trivial: Investigations into Popular Culture, University of Vienna/Vienna University of Applied Arts, Austria, 1-2 Jun 2012. (Keynote, postgraduate conference)

‘Ken Loach in England: work and the working classes under neo-liberalism and globalisation’, From 'Hidden Agenda' to the 'Free World': The political films of Ken Loach, study day, BFI (British Film Institute) Southbank, London, in association with Royal Holloway University of London, 1 Oct 2011. (Invited speaker, directly after Channel 4 News / formerly BBC Newsnight Economics Editor Paul Mason)

‘Majesty/alchemy/anarchy: fashionable and unfashionable queens in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)’, Fashionable Queens: Body, Power, Gender Symposium, Institute for English Studies & Institute for Sociology, University of Vienna, Austria, 3-4 Dec 2010. (Paper delivered in absentia due to flight cancellations.) 

Keynote speaker plus film introduction to Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (UK, 2009), Radical British Screens symposium, University of the West of England (UWE) & Screen South-West Research Network, UWE/Arnolfini Arts Centre, Bristol, UK, 3 Sep 2010. 

‘Not represented: on absences, specificities and post-punk music cultures in post-2000 British film’, British Film 2000–2010: Crossing Borders, Transferring Cultures, Centre for Intercultural Studies/Faculty of Translation, Sprache und Kultur, Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, 18-21 Feb 2010. (Invited plenary speaker)

‘“Not new wave. It’s inspired by punk.” The post-punk female in British film: Hazel O’Connor and Breaking Glass’, Post-Punk Performance: The Alternative 80s in Britain, School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, UK, 9 Sep 2009. (Invited speaker)

‘Beyond the heritage debate: investigating period-film audiences’, Representation. Period: A Study Day in Representations, History and Nostalgia in Period Film and Television, University of Sussex, UK, 15 Sep 2005. (Keynote speaker alongside Professor Sue Harper)

Selected other recent papers

‘Dissecting Ripper Street (BBC-TV 2012-13, BBC-TV/Amazon 2014–): from Victorian East London to 21st-century global markets’, 10th Annual Conference of the Association of Adaptation Studies: Adaptations and the Metropolis, Senate House, University of London, UK, 24-25 Sep 2015.

‘“That’s [never] finished”: Maurice without ending, from Forster’s palimpsest to fan-text’,  E. M. Forster's Maurice: A conference marking the centenary of Forster's writing of the novel, University of St Andrews, UK, 24-25 Nov 2012.

‘Forgotten histories? Film on Four and British retro and heritage films of the 1980s’, Channel 4 and British Film Culture, University of Portsmouth/British Universities’ Film & Video Council (BUFVC) at BFI Southbank, London, UK, 1-2 Nov 2012.

Consultancy work

  • Merchant Ivory: Classics, Celluloid and Class, produced by Simon Elmes and presented by Laurence Scott for BBC Radio 3, broadcast 6 Apr 2014. Expert contributor and sole academic interviewee (alongside novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, actress Helena Bonham-Carter and others) for this programme on the films and record-breaking filmmaking and personal partnership of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter and novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. 
  • Vice magazine: consulted as expert source for a feature on BBC3’s cult series Monkey Dust (2003-5): ‘Remembering Monkey Dust: the UK’s greatest animated satire’, by Dan Wilkinson, 20 May 2015. My 2007 refereed journal article ‘London and contemporary Britain in Monkey Dust’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 4:2, was the first (and remains virtually the only) academic appraisal of Monkey Dust.
  • AHRC Screening European Heritage project, University of Leeds: interviewed as an invited leading expert source, 2,800-word interview, published 25 Jul 2013.
  • When Harry Potter Met Frodo: The Strange World of Fan Fiction, Somethin’ Else Productions for BBC Radio 4, presented by novelist Naomi Alderman, broadcast 26 Nov 2012. Consulted during the programme’s development by Somethin’ Else’s Head of Features Russell Finch.
  • Invited contributor in 2012 to Sight & Sound magazine’s world-famous, once-a-decade, Greatest Films of All Time Poll of leading critics and filmmakers worldwide, considered one of the most influential of its kind.
  • ‘Cameras in pursuit of the unfilmable’ by Andrew Johnson, Independent on Sunday, 6 Jun 2010, pp.24-25. Consulted as expert and quoted in feature on the adaptation of ‘unfilmable’ novels.
  • Contribution to project research, authorship of lead DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay, and media coverage for the British Film Institute’s Flipside DVD/Blu-ray release of three ‘lost’ films by the iconoclastic, radical, feminist 1960s-70s British filmmaker Jane Arden and her partner Jack Bond (more recently, director of the Adam Ant documentary The Blue-Back Hussar), Jul-Aug 2009. ‘Always too early’’: DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay for Separation (1967), released Jul 2009. ‘Long live the ghosts’: feature for Sight & Sound, Aug 2009.

Current research students

Professor Claire Monk welcomes enquiries from prospective research students wishing to pursue topics that connect with her research interests.

Current research students
Laura Fryer (UK), PhD (Midlands3Cities Scholarship), FT, 2nd supervisor. The Adapted Screenplays of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Else Thompson (UK), PT, 1st supervisor. A Comparative Study of the Role of Collaborative Workshops and Co-operatives within a Female-Led Filmmaking Practice.

Research students: recent completions

Françoise Poos (Luxembourg), PhD, PT, 2nd supervisor. The Making of a National Audio-Visual Archive: The CNA [Centre nationale de l’audiovisuel, Luxembourg] and the Hidden Images Exhibition, 2016.

Caitlin Shaw (Canada), PhD, FT, 1st supervisor. Remediating the Eighties: Nostalgia and Retro in British Screen Fiction from 2005 to 2011, 2015.

Andrew Johnstone (UK), MA Independent Study, PT, 1st supervisor. Documentary Film in International Development, 2013.

Llewella Burton (UK), MA Independent Study, PT, 2nd supervisor. Interpretation as Practice: Chasing the Post-Heritage Dream, 2012.

Takako Seino (Japan), MPhil, PT, de facto 1st supervisor. Realism and Representations of the Working Class in Contemporary British Cinema, 2011.

Internally funded research project information

Jan–Jun 2016: DMU Research Leave Award.

Jan–Aug 2010: DMU Faculty of Humanities Reseach Leave Award.

Professional esteem indicators

Journal Editorial Board Member

Journal of British Cinema & Television (Edinburgh University Press), 2012–
Punk & Post-Punk (Intellect), 2011–

Journal Refereeing and Peer Review for Publishers

Since 2008, for the above journals plus:

Adaptation (Oxford University Press)
Canadian Journal of Film Studies (Film Studies Association of Canada/Concordia University)
Consumption, Markets and Culture (Taylor & Francis)
Critical Studies in Media Communication (University of Illinois)
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance (Intellect)
The Minnesota Review (Duke University Press)
Rethinking History (Taylor & Francis)

And peer-review of monographs & edited collections for:
Amsterdam University Press
Bloomsbury Publishing (Bloomsbury Film & Media, USA)
British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmilan (and, during 2000-08, BFI Publishing)
Manchester University Press

Case studies

Merchant Ivory: Classics, Celluloid and Class, produced by Simon Elmes and presented by Laurence Scott for BBC Radio 3, broadcast 6 Apr 2014. Expert contributor and sole academic interviewee (alongside novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, actress Helena Bonham-Carter and others) for this programme on the films and record-breaking filmmaking and personal partnership of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter and novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

AHRC Screening European Heritage project, University of Leeds: invited expert source/witness for a scoping study that reported to European policymakers and the UK House of Lords, including a 2,800-word interview, 2013.

In 2012, one of only 26 UK academics – and 9 UK female academics – then below Professor or Emeritus level invited to contribute to Sight & Sound magazine’s famous once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time Poll of leading critics and filmmakers worldwide, considered one of the most influential of its kind.

AHRC project and conference Channel Four and British Film Culture, University of Portsmouth/British Universities’ Film & Video Council (BUFVC) at BFI Southbank, London, 1-2 Nov 2012. Plenary paper, ‘Forgotten histories? Film on Four and British retro and heritage films of the 1980s’, was a featured audio recording on the project website. (Website/URL currently undergoing updating)

‘Eyre conditioning’: invited feature on the new big-screen Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011; starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender) for Sight & Sound, Oct 2011.

Invited speaker, From 'Hidden Agenda' to the 'Free World': The political films of Ken Loach study day held at BFI (British Film Institute) Southbank, London, 1 Oct 2011, speaking directly after Channel 4 News / formerly BBC Newsnight Economics Editor Paul Mason.

Q&A panellist with veteran British social-realist film director Ken Loach, DMU Cultural Exchanges Festival 2010, 4 Mar 2010.

Contribution to project research, authorship of lead DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay, and media coverage for the British Film Institute’s Flipside DVD/Blu-ray release of three ‘lost’ films by the radical feminist 1960s-70s British filmmaker Jane Arden and her partner Jack Bond (more recently, director of the Adam Ant documentary The Blue-Back Hussar), Jul-Aug 2009. ‘Always too early’’: DVD/Blu-ray booklet essay for Separation (1967), released Jul 2009. ‘Long live the ghosts’: feature for Sight & Sound, Aug 2009

Freelance film critic for the international film magazine Sight & Sound 1993–2002, and occasional continuing contributor.

Invited talks at world-class venues including BFI Southbank (London) and the Arnolfini (Bristol). Talks at local venues engaging local communities and young people have included National Trust’s Sutton House (London Borugh of Hackney), Barking & Dagenham Malthouse Monthly Film Club (a cultural regeneration initiative in the London Borugh of Barking & Dagenham), and Phoenix Square (Leicester), including National Schools’ Film Week 2012.

Dr Claire Monk
Monk: Heritage Film Audiences book cover

Monk & Sargeant: British Historical Cinema book cover