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...

BAFTSS is making available 5 Conference Bursaries of up to £200 each to support attendance at the Association's annual conference for those members who are postgraduate researchers. Apply here: www.baftss.org/conference-b...

@manchesterup.bsky.social has renewed its support for the BAFTSS New Connections Fund! Each ECR/academic on a fixed-term contract benefitting from the scheme in 2025 will receive a book voucher. To benefit from the Fund, there is still time to apply! manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/blog/2025/01...

Miért is nevetünk egy egyébként fasz magyar politikus angolján? Mert mások nevettek a miénken? Miért is kell szégyellni ha nehezen megtanult másik nyelven beszélünk döcögve olyan helyzetben ahol a legfolyékonyabban beszélőnek is botladozna a nyelve a stressztől? Már próbáltad? Neked ment? Faszomba!

I was lucky enough to be chosen for the New Connections programme last year. It's a great way to share research and the help with travel/funding costs meant I could go to London to share my work.

📢DEADLINE THIS FRIDAY📢 The BAFTSS New Connections Fund supports ECRs/academics on fixed-term contracts planning to present their work in a research seminar/workshop in 2025, providing £150 bursaries towards travel/research costs. Also, book vouchers offered by our sponsor @manchesterup.bsky.social📚

I find it bewildering that everyone talks about The Brutalist’s “Hungarian architect Tóth” as if he were an actual Hungarian. He’s as Hungarian as Clouseau is French. They even used AI to make him sound more Hungarian. Because he is not! He is an American fiction.

Managed to pick up a double breasted cashmere-wool blend Chester Barrie in a Prince of Wales check for a steal. It’s the stuff of my dreams and appears unworn. Look out for it at Baftss25!

Right. And this fixing by the AI is reproduced in the way American gatekeepers adjudicate the authenticity and ethics of the mechanically produced sonic foreignness. So in a sense, the from-here critics and the AI perform similar acts of control over the foreign voice.

It’s a stressful time for all in HE but really looking forward to BAFTSS25 hosted by Warwick to continue conversations from last year about film, television & screen studies & practice, the state of the field & the wider sector, & to catch up with friends & collaborators. @warwickfilmtv.bsky.social

A more interesting thought on the AI accent work in The Brutalist and the Callas biopic is how the effort to fix or enhance the performance gives machinic-ness to these nominally foreign bodies played by stars with complete access to fully realized belonging in the US context.

I’ve been marking for so long I read Albuqu-esque.

Please think about putting in for this www.BAFTSS.org fund. The application window closes on 31 January. If you’d like to share your research with a new audience, this is a great scheme designed to enable the beginning of a beautiful academic friendship. (Sorry.)

If I understood the email I've just deleted, someone won money to map work in the field, and the method they devised was to ask the field to kindly map itself for them.

[📢EXTENDED DEADLINE 31/01📢] BAFTSS New Connections Fund is aimed at ECR/academics on fixed-term contracts presenting their research in Film/Media/Screen Studies as part of seminar series/research talks, providing bursaries of £150 to help support travel/research costs www.baftss.org/new-connecti...

How very exciting! This is the only time I’ve seen a turbotière in action. Apart from the times I’ve used mine. Which is plain aluminium rather than copper. I’m not that extravagant. mubi.com/films/pot-au...

Disappointing to see Owen Jones invoking spectre of Hungary as what awaits the US. Lazy & entirely false. Orbán isn't the OG, Hungary isn't patient zero. Orbán & his illiberalism were produced in decades-long interactions with, inside, outside & on margins of 'the West' (& the USSR/Russia et al).

Few films are so brazen in their disregard for the location used as Chief of Station. The shot of its stars sitting in a deserted Gundel with the local server all but invisible is not even a metaphor but the literal mise-en-scène of the one-sided extraction of value by and for the film.