Professor Laura Mulvey joins the Department

The Department of Film Studies is delighted to announce that Professor Laura Mulvey is joining us as Honorary Professor from March 2025. Professor Mulvey is an eminent scholar of Film Studies, her work as a theorist and filmmaker informing the field since the early 1970s. Her landmark article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (Screen, 1975) introduced the conceptual framework of the 'male gaze', a foundational theory which influenced feminist approaches to film studies as well as other disciplines throughout the humanities. This article remains one of the most widely read and cited in the field. Her publications, from Fetishism and Curiosity (1996) to Death 24x a Second (2006) have continued to have a profound influence on film scholarship. Her theoretical concerns with semiotics and psychoanalysis also informed her experimental filmmaking practice, including Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), one of six films she made with Peter Wollen. She has brought film studies debates to audiences beyond the academy, serving as a public intellectual through her research in film history and culture, regularly speaking to audiences at a variety of international venues, such as the BFI, ICA and Harvard Film Archive.

Professor Mulvey's appointment connects to the Department of Film Studies' strengths in film history and historiography, especially through a variety of feminist approaches to understanding film production, exhibition and circulation, as well as expertise on non-narrative and artists' film. This connection also further develops collaborations between the Department and the St Andrews Institute of Gender Studies (StAIGS), which draws on colleagues from multiple disciplines within the University.

Professor Mulvey was previously Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was Director of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) from 2012 to 2015. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989); Citizen Kane (1992); Fetishism and Curiosity (1996); Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006); and Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (2019). She has co-edited British Experimental Television (2007); Feminisms (2015); and Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and British Experimental Film in the 1970s (2017). Mulvey made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen, including Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), and two films with artist and filmmaker Mark Lewis.