Shame on Scorsese. Never liked him or his films, but this underscores the narcissism that underpins his persona as the ne plus ultra of American film auteurs. AI is useful to him because it permits greater fidelity in realizing his vision, further reducing the agency of his collaborators. Piss off.

Extraordinary shamlessness from Szabó: the lesson of my films is to steer well clear of power, but also, I've never had to worry about where financing for my films comes from. The latter is true, because he never did as he preaches. hvg.hu/360/20260605...

Love it when someone who loves to make things mandatory for staff cancels a presentation they're due to give on the morning it is supposed to happen.

#RaisingFilms has teamed up with King’s College London to conduct an impact and evaluation study of our work over the past eleven years. If you’ve engaged with Raising Films over the last decade, we’d love to hear from you! Survey closes 12th June 2026 app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/kings/rais...

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

Hilarious that the minister in charge of Reform voter-baiting (the Home Secretary), who has massive responsibility for haemorrhaging voters to the Greens, is joining calls for Starmer to quit for losing voters. Hard to think of a more cynical move.

We are also looking for a postdoc to conduct a study on socialist Bulgaria for my ERC project "Racial Socialism". Please share widely! stellenboerse.uni-mainz.de/jgu/job/55196

We are looking for a doctoral researcher to conduct a study on the GDR (or Yugoslavia) for my ERC project "Racial Socialism". Please share widely! stellenboerse.uni-mainz.de/jgu/job/55297

When you're mad at your father because he's emotionally distant and a lousy grandfather and you catch yourself with fat all over your face standing over the food waste bin snaffling as you scrape the last of the fat and gristle off a gnarly bone with your teeth and you realize you are him. Just me?

The BAFTSS EC is delighted to announce the 2026 Outstanding Achievement Award recipient: the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive. For more details please see the BAFTSS website: www.baftss.org/outstanding2...

Hey, so I'm out of practice with 'announcements' but: I wrote a book and it's coming out in November. It's called The Sonic Surrogate and it's about sound reproduction, reproductive crisis and the proliferation of music technologies that promise to take care of us www.ucpress.edu/books/the-so...

The closing date for our (fees-only) PhD studentship is fast approaching...

Deadline today!

We are pleased to announce that the conference website, including the schedule is now live: www.baftss.org/conference-2... Places are limited - register early to avoid disappointment. Deadline: 8th March 2026. Queries can be directed to [email protected]

The 2026 @baftss.bsky.social Conference website is live. Read the full programme, register, find out about the publishers in attendance, the keynote, the conference dinner, the venue and the conference team. You can contact them via the form at the bottom of the page. www.baftss.org/conference-2...

Been a while but I'm still bewildered by that elaborate SF novella call out on the 'other' Jiscmail. Talk about punching down: long-embedded in academic structures, the reply aller attacks the ECR for a dysfunction of HE: its culture of service/free labour. Who made the bed? Who shat in it? The ECR?

BAFTSS is making available 7 Conference Bursaries of up to £200 each to support attendance at the Association's annual conference for those members who are postgraduate researchers (including MA and PhD students). Complete the form: www.baftss.org/conference-b... Deadline: 20th March 2026.

Finally worked out a way to get over from Ireland for AWP (thanks in no small part to good friends) so if any mags or presses are interested in me reading please hit me up. Here's a picture of me with my arms out (Plz RT???)

In a sector under attack - from govt refusal to fund HE; KPI- and cuts-obsessed VCs; plagiarism engines; culture warriors - mutual support, sharing of experience and collaboration are more important than ever. Please consider participating in this important @baftss.bsky.social scheme in either role.

BAFTSS continues to run its Early Career Mentoring Scheme, which has been invaluable to helping ECRs in this increasingly precarious sector. This is a call for new mentors and mentees to take part in the scheme! For more info: www.baftss.org/early-career... #baftss #earlycareermentoringscheme

I've been thinking about multilingual scholars' practice. I use English only, to inhabit an outside-in/inside-out perspective and to force me to consider word usage carefully. When someone translates their work/publishes bilingually, I wonder how attentive they are to consistency of terminology.

Watching Frankenstein and it's hilarious how Del Toro fetishizes traditional effects and genres and their stylistic markers and professes to hate AI, but the whole film looks like an AI cheese dream. (To be fair to him, perhaps all this tells us is that AI was trained primarily on Del Toro's films?)

I think what QT's top 10 of 21st-century cinema shows is not how far he has fallen but how narrowminded, extractive and domineering his engagement with 'world cinema' always had been. Or that the list was written by AI.

Gearing up for my lecture on the noses of film villains. Funny to think that students used to bristle at the parallel I draw btw you know who and the Phantom of the Opera and the argument that the wizard school books/films reproduce racist eugenic discourses of blood, lineage, sex and race.

This Black Friday - Every Course Must Go! ✅ 100% reduction of some subjects! ✅ Modules slashed! Study them before it’s too late!

any faculty encouraging this are being enormously irresponsible

How does Hollywood separate the art from the “cancelled” artist after #MeToo and how does it use Eastern Europe for the operation? To find out, read our article co-authored with Anna Mártonfi, in Celebrity Studies. (Link gives free access to the first 50 viewers) www.tandfonline.com/eprint/JKJ8U...

This article in Nature is wild. It makes a claim to analysing bias in online representation objectively in a way that would be funny if it weren't symptomatic of where we stand with humanities research. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looking forward to giving a research paper in York tomorrow with my long-time collaborator @havasjulia.bsky.social on East-West relations, popular media, the "Hungarian GoT" Hunyadi, nutty Cold War reprise The Gorge and think pieces which posit Orbán's Hungary as originator of Western illiberalism.

The BAFTSS PGR Poster Showcase is now open to applications for next year's annual conference in Bournemouth, 15-17 April 2026. You could win a prize of £150! www.baftss.org/pgr-poster-s... #baftss #cfp #pgr #conference

The river police's 'what the horse prick is this' is actually a very sensible question to a man in an expensive plastic bucket in the middle of one of the busiest waterways in Europe where collisions between pleasure boats and freighters have had tragic consequences. hvg.hu/elet/2025100...

Finally ready to share this! Symposium: Chloé Zhao’s Transnational Cinema: Nomads, Cowboys, Superheroines Friday, November 7 2025, University of Portsmouth Keynote: Dr Kiki Yu (QMUL) Roundtable: Prof. Yannis Tzioumakis (Liverpool), Prof. Rob Stone (Birmingham) Please share! tinyurl.com/34j84yuj

We'll shortly be putting a call out for the BAFTSS SIG Panel next April in Bournemouth - check your inboxes this afternoon. If you didn't get it, but would like to be on the panel, get in touch.

JOB: lecturer/assistant professor in global film and media studies. 5yr contract, salary scale €64,753-€102,538, closes noon (Irish time) on October 20th. pls share and lmk if you have any questions! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOU194/l...

Thrilled to share the very open Call for Proposals for BAFTSS 2026 on 15-17 April in Bournemouth. Amid all the stress and uncertainty of HE, the annual conference is a great place to reconnect, reflect, think new thoughts and make new plans. Join us! @baftss.bsky.social www.baftss.org/cfp-2026.html

So tired of seeing this framing time and again (that US is adopting Orbán’s policies and strategies). Hungary did not originate what’s going on in the US today. Hungary is an importer, not an exporter of this type of politics. But I guess it’s easier to blame Eastern Europeans.

At an international conference. The photographer is creating a buzz. (And evidence of buzz.)

Interesting news of pause to REF prep. I wonder if motivated by concern that REF is drifting out of alignment with strategy or failing to shift into alignment with current strategy. I wonder how bad it will be for academics when REF has been realigned (with what?). 2029.ref.ac.uk/news/pause-t...

The last time someone not educated at Oxbridge according to their Wikipedia page became President of the British Academy was in 1985. 🙄 That was Randolph Quirk (Yale and UCL).

This must have been a difficult decision for those involved, but brave it is. Scholars that have been instrumental in shaping the field of film and media studies, and having longstanding relations with the press, resign from being series editors after the buy-out. mediastudies.hypotheses.org/6850

Great article by @zsolt.bsky.social and B. Stanley. As I've been trying to say also, illiberalism in "Eastern Europe" has never been unrelated to "the West" or "anti-Western." Also because, as Z and S show, the West isn't what it used to be. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

@germanatportsmouth.bsky.social @uophistory.bsky.social @devorashawa.bsky.social @scmstudies.bsky.social

Thank you Rick, Mary, Douglas, James and Pietari and the whole team. You have worked so very hard. BAFTSS is a special conference: it’s always uniquely BAFTSS, but it’s also unique to the host institution each time. Can’t wait to see what it’s like at Bournemouth. (But first some rest.)

Very well done to all our PGR poster competition entrants this year and congratulations to those shortlisted: @xanthepajarillo.bsky.social (Honourable Mention); Sarah Bell (Runner-Up) and Liaoliao Wu (Winner)! 👏 #BAFTSS2025 @baftss2025.bsky.social

Really looking forward to delivering this paper on a fascinating film that sunk without a trace with the brilliant @havasjulia.bsky.social as part of Friday's Genre Hybridity panel @baftss2025.bsky.social

Our #CFP for the TV & New Media special issue “Imagining US in Europe: Europeanness in Contemporary American Prestige TV”, co-edited with @ggergely.bsky.social and @victoriapistivsek.bsky.social, is out. Abstracts due 25 April, further details here: cstonline.net/call-for-pap...

Reviewer 2 in the age of AI: competing titles listed in proposal review were misattributed and in one case entirely fictive, a made up title by a made-up author (not found in national reference library, nor on Google Books/Scholar by full title, author or subject keywords).

We have written to the Secretary of State for Education to call on the Government to take urgent action to prevent mass layoffs and resolve the funding crisis in the sector. Our letter in full: www.baftss.org/education-se...

Are you a BAFTSS member attending next month's conference, but have limited/no access to funding? @baftss.bsky.social offers 5 bursaries of £200 to help with travel & other costs. More info: www.baftss.org/funding.html And don't forget the Quarterly Travel Fund to access support for other events!

In other news, we had some exciting pieces up on our website over the past few weeks. An extract from 'Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear' (@silver-press.bsky.social), @joyousnoises.bsky.social wrote about gender and technology. Read it here: thelondonmagazine.org/essay-low-qu...