Mandy Merck

MANDY MERCK  joined Royal Holloway as Professor of Media Arts in 1999.  She previously taught at Sussex University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Duke University and Cornell University.  She is a specialist in feminist and queer approaches to the cinema and representations of national identity in US film.  In 2011-2012 she is on leave, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to write a book provisionally titled The Melodrama of Celebrity.  Future projects include a monograph on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 

Her current doctoral students research:

            *The Critical Roots of Magical Realism in Film

            *The Cinema’s Talking Dolls

            *The Activist History of Feminist Film Criticism

            *New Queer Horror

            *The Star Persona of Tom Cruise

She has previously supervised dissertations on topics such as

            *The Teenage Girl’s Rite of Passage Film

            *Narrating Intersex

            *Controversial Representations of Gender and Sexuality in UK Advertising

            *Gender and Disorder in British Culture in the 1960s

Her current undergraduate courses are ‘The Cultures of Celebrity’ and ‘Melodrama’.

Her books include

            *Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex (co-edited with Stella Sandford),

             Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

            *Hollywood’s American Tragedies, Berg, 2007

            *America First: Naming the Nation in US Film, Routledge, 2007

*The Art of Tracey Emin (co-edited with Chris Townsend), Thames and      Hudson, 2002

*In Your Face: Nine Sexual Studies, New York University Press, 2000

*Coming Out of Feminism? (co-edited with Naomi Segal and Elizabeth Wright), Blackwell 1998

            *After Diana:  Irreverent Elegies, Verso, 1998

            *Perversions: Deviant Readings, Virago (UK) and Routledge (US), 1993

*The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (co-edited with John Caughie, Barbara Creed and Annette Kuhn), Routledge, 1992

Recent articles include:

‘Brother Animal’s Long Tail: Sigmund Freud, Victor Tausk and Intellectual Influence’, in Ruth Parkin-Gounelas (ed), The Psychology and Politics of the

Collective: Groups, Crowds and Mass Identifications, Routledge, 2012

‘Susan Sontag’s Screen Tests’, in Glyn Peter Davis and Gary Needham (eds),

Warhol in Ten Takes, British Film Institute/ Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

            ‘The Question of Caster Semenya’, Radical Philosophy 160, March/April 2010.

            Translated and published in Poli-Politiques de l’Image, 2010.