Dr Alex Marlow-Mann BA, MA, PhD

• BA (Film Studies and Italian)
• MA (Film Studies and Film Archiving)
• PhD (Italian film)

After graduating in Film Studies and Italian from the University of Kent I spent a year teaching English in Naples before taking an MA in Film Archiving at the University of East Anglia and working for the BFI’s National Film and Television Archive. I then returned to full-time academia to complete a PhD on Neapolitan Cinema at the University of Reading.

I worked briefly in the Department of Italian at the University of Leeds and the BFI’s Filmographic Department before taking up a post as Research Coordinator at the Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. At the CFS I was responsible for the day-to-day running of StAFS publishing and for organising conferences and lecture series. I also helped to set up the British Association of Film Television and Screen Studies.

From 2012-2014 I was Lecturer in European Cinema at the University of Birmingham and Acting Director of B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies for Rob Stone during his Leverhulme Fellowship.

I have taught widely on European Cinema and on such modules as ‘The Political Thriller’ and ‘The Art of the Moving Image’, as well as a variety of other subjects.

I specialise in European cinema, with particular expertise in the cinema of Italy, and have published extensively on a wide-range of under-studied genres (musicals, crime thrillers, historical epics, gothic horror) and contemporary filmmakers (Mario Martone, Antonio Capuano, Paolo Sorrentino).

More broadly I am concerned with the problematics around distinctions between national/ transnational/ regional cinema and ‘popular’/ ‘art’ cinema – and the areas of intersection between these concepts.

These interests are no being developed in a major new book series for Routledge, of which I am co-editor, with Prof. Rob Stone (University of Birmingham), Prof. Paul Cooke (University of Leeds) and Dr. Stepahnie (University of Leeds) entitled Remapping World Cinema: Regional Tensions and Global Transformations. The series will kick-off with a 40-chapter volume entitled The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, which I will be co-editing with the other series editors, and for which I will be contributing a chapter on ‘Regional Cinemas’

More recently I have been exploring cognitive theory and in particular cognitive analyses of the role of emotion in film and this research will provide the theoretical basis for my next monograph. The first book-length study of an important but curiously neglected genre, The Political Thriller in Film - Genre, Ideology and Emotion, will provide a historical and critical study of the interplay between emotion and politics in a wide range of examples of the genre from around the globe.

Having previously worked for the BFI, the BFI National Film Archive and an independent arthouse cinema, I have also a long-standing interest in the cultural institutions of cinema, and in particular film archives and film festivals, most obviously manifest in my recent edited collection, Archival Film Festivals (StAFS, 2013). 

• I am one of the founding members of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies and I currently serve on the Executive Committee.
• I am a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Italian and Media Studies and the e-journal Cine-Excess.
• I recently organised the conference Cine Excess VII: European Erotic Cinema: Identity, Desire and Disgust.