Dr Lisa Smithstead

Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Media

Welsh language proficiency

Basic Welsh Speaker
Available For Postgraduate Supervision

Research Links

About

Lisa is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of Media and Communications. She has previously lectured in British and American Cinema at the University of Exeter and in Film Studies at the University of East Anglia. Lisa joined Swansea Film Studies in 2022.

Her first monograph titled Off to the Pictures: Cinemagoing, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain was published with Edinburgh University Press in 2016. The study explored women’s intermedial fictions surrounding the first three decades of UK film culture, giving new understanding to female-created cultures of cinema and their influence on women’s everyday lives through an original exploration of short stories, middlebrow and modernist literature, tabloid criticism, and a wealth of ephemera. Her second monograph, Reframing Vivien Leigh, was published with Oxford University Press in 2021. The book explored Leigh’s globally dispersed archives to chart a new history of her creative agency and screen and stage craft. Other strands of Lisa’s research have included histories of location filming in rural spaces and archival actuality footage as a key component of Deaf histories in the South West of England, which was part of an AHRC Connected Communities Grant in 2015.

Areas Of Expertise

  • Feminism and film history
  • Women’s cinema
  • Women’s writing and print cultures of film
  • Adaptation
  • Cinema and intermediality
  • Interwar cinema
  • Film audiences and reception
  • Modernism, modernity and the movies
  • Archival theory and practice
  • Historical Fandoms

Career Highlights

Teaching Interests

Lisa’s teaching focusses on introducing students to film analysis, history and theory. Her specialist teaching focuses on adaptation across screen media and literature and women’s film histories and futures.

Research Award Highlights