Television Beyond Borders:
The event will be chaired by Professor Justin Smith, Director of the Cinema and Television History Institute. Talks will include:
Dr Julia Havas (Leicester Media School): Beasts from the East: Fantasies of Eastern Europeanness in Streaming-era British Drama
Dr Gurvinder Aujla-Sidhu (Leicester Media School): Broadcasting to the diaspora globally - A Collaborative Doctoral Project
Dr Vicky Ball (Leicester Media School): Crossing scholarly borders and challenging androcentric histories of British television drama.
Dr Kennetta Hammond Perry (Stephen Lawrence Research Centre): Marginalised Voices: Researching Race for the BBC's 100 Voices Oral History Project.
Further details on each talk and speaker biographies can be found below.
Bookings will close 1 hour prior to the start of the event, and registrants will receive a link to join the online event 24 hours before the event, via their provided email address.
Please contact the DMU Events Office on eventsoffice@dmu.ac.uk if you have any questions or if you have any special event requirements.
This event is open to all.
Talk summaries and speaker biographies:
Beasts from the East: Fantasies of Eastern Europeanness in Streaming-era British Drama
This talk explores Britain’s transnational TV culture in the globalized streaming age, by focusing on the relationship between British TV production and Eastern Europe. Based on Dr Havas' current research, it takes account of two interconnected and prominent, yet rarely discussed developments of recent years: first, the so-called “runaway production” phenomenon, whereby prestige UK drama productions outsource filming to Eastern Europe, most conspicuously to Hungary (e.g., The Last Kingdom [2015-, BBC2/Netflix]). Second, the talk highlights the increasingly prominent figure of the Eastern European itinerant in recent British drama (e.g., Dracula [BBC/Netflix, 2020], Killing Eve [BBC America], The Salisbury Poisonings (BBC, 2020]), and the figure’s role in mobilising ideas of nationhood and foreignness in Brexit-era Britain. The talk demonstrates gendered colonialist dynamics of British TV production’s relationship to Eastern Europe, which problematises British public service broadcasting’s declared commitment to positive and empowering discourses of identity.
Julia Havas is Lecturer in Media at De Montfort University. Her monograph Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television is forthcoming with Wayne State UP in March 2022. She has published journal articles and contributed book chapters to edited collections on Anglo-American television’s gender and race politics and relationship to cultural value, streaming culture, Hungarian film and TV, and the transcultural flow of media.
Broadcasting to the diaspora globally - A Collaborative Doctoral Project
Zee TV (UK) was launched in India in 1992 and later in the UK. The Hindi language station broadcasts to 170 countries globally in Hindi and offers news and entertainment for the South Asian diaspora. The Anita Anand (Zee TV) Collection (1995-2004) is an archive based at De Montfort University of news materials produced specifically for British Asian audiences and offers a unique doctoral opportunity to understand the impact of such programming on audiences in the midlands. This talk outlines how the project was designed and what the study might uncover.
Gurvinder Aujla-Sidhu is an Associate Professor in Journalism at De Montfort University. She worked for ten years in BBC radio. She currently leads the undergraduate Broadcast Journalism degree and is Associate Head for Leicester Media School at De Montfort University. She is also a lead member on the Decolonising DMU Project which aims to examine and understand the challenges BAME students face in Higher Education. She is a member of the Media Discourse Centre at DMU, and is a member of the MeCCSA Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Network, and was the Deputy Chair of the group between January 2016 and January 2019.
Crossing scholarly borders and challenging androcentric histories of British television drama
This lecture explores the recovery of creative histories of women writers in the masculine domain of British television play production. Using research current from the BA/Leverhulme funded ‘Women writers and writing women into histories of Play for Today’ project, the lecture explores the significance of this research in terms of fleshing out herstories but also recasting television histories and the teaching canon.
Dr Vicky Ball is Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Television Histories at De Montfort University in Leicester (UK). She is the investigator on the BA/Leverhulme project entitled ‘'Play for Today' at 50: Women Writers and Writing Women into Histories of British Television Drama’. She was recently co-investigator on the AHRC funded project ‘Women’s Work, Working Women: A Longitudinal Study of Women Working in the Film and Television Industries (1933-1989)’. Most recently she is the co-editor of ‘Structures of Feeling: Contemporary Research in Women’s Film and Broadcasting history,’ a special themed issue of Women’s History Review.
Marginalised Voices: Researching Race for the BBC's 100 Voices Oral History Project
This talk will provide an overview of DMU’s emerging work as part of the BBC’s centenary project exploring how the dynamics of race and racism have shaped both the history of the BBC and the ways that the BBC has influenced important cultural and political dialogues that have informed the history of a global nation. Recognising the important role that the BBC has played historically in shaping and reflecting ideas about race and racism in the UK and beyond, this talk will highlight the DMU research team’s approach to curating a set of oral history interviews designed to shed light on how race has shaped the lives of those responsible for delivering programming on the BBC and how it has informed the development of content on various BBC platforms in the last century. In doing so the project team intends to provide an important intervention in the scholarship on the history of the BBC which will enrich our understanding of the significance of race within the UK media landscape in the last century.
Dr Kennetta Hammond Perry serves as Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University where she is also a Reader in History. Prior to her appointment at De Montfort, she was an Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of the African & African American Studies Program at East Carolina University in the USA. Dr Perry’s research interests include Black British history, transnational race politics, Black women’s history and histories of statecrafted violence. She has been awarded several fellowships and has published widely including a major monograph on African Caribbean migration to Britain, London Is the Place For Me (Oxford, 2016). Currently she is researching histories racial violence and the relationship between the decline of the welfare state and the expansion of the carceral state in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century and completing and book on the life, death and legacy of David Oluwale.