The establishment of a Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre in DMU’s Faculty of Humanities is the natural extension of a momentum that has been building over the last decade.

During that time, staff within the Department of Media, Film and Journalism have become internationally known for ground-breaking work which has had a significant impact in a variety of fields of research.

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PROGRAMME OF EVENTS JAN-JULY 2012  

The CATH Centre is delighted to announce its most exciting and ambitious six months of events yet. Highlights of the programme across three cities include:

• The 15th British Silent Film Festival, to be held in Cambridge in April.
• A new collaboration with The Cinema Museum, ‘Cine Sisters Live’, which features career interviews with famous women from the film and television industries.
• Research symposia on the Centenary of the British Board of Film Classification and on Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar.
• The annual Associate Research Fellows’ Day in February.
• The Centre’s first Postgraduate Conference in April.
• An international conference and film festival in July.

CATH NEWS BULETIN AUTUMN 2011 (PDF)  

In judging more than 35 per cent of the department’s outputs ‘world-leading (4*) the RAE 2008 panel commented; ‘Through its publications, the department has a substantial presence and reputation, particularly in the study of British cinema and television.’

Although work on these British media constitutes the core activity of the new CATH Research Centre, it also embraces the wealth of high quality research that is being done on, for example, European cinema and Hollywood history.

The term ‘History’ does not imply that the Centre is interested purely in ‘old’ films and TV shows. Instead, the term is used, in a way common among film scholars, to refer to empirical scholarship on contextual issues – be they past or present – as opposed to ‘criticism’, which is primarily concerned with textual analysis and theories of representation. So the Centre’s approach includes work on contemporary policy, political economy and cultural and social impact that is grounded in the methodologies of historical research.

Over the next decade, these concerns will ensure that the research activities of the CATH Centre remain relevant to policy concerns as well as to developing directions in film studies and media history.