Daryl Perrins

I am a senior lecturer in film studies at the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of Glamorgan. I have taught at the University since the year of my graduation in 1996. I am very old and left school in 1981 without qualifications. Between these two dates, when I was not unemployed, I worked at various unskilled jobs, these included refuge collector, labourer, barman and care/support worker with people with learning difficulties. In my efforts not to ever have a proper job I have tried my hand at rock music via a number of local bands, and most recently stand-up comedy. However like Billy Liar I still live and work in the city of my birth and refused to join Julie Christie on the train to the big smoke many years ago now.   

My PhD thesis will aim to interrogate the ways in which the Welsh working class have been constructed in film and TV.  In particular I am interested in how the signifiers of class and economic identity are confused with the signifiers of nation in a post- devolution epoch in which a postcolonial consensus dominates. My study will begin by considering how the mining communities of the South Wales valleys, and the masculinity therein, was constructed as heroic, by a British and American cycle of mining films from the 1940’s.

Other areas of general research interest include: hyphenated identities on screen, situation comedy, film and history, cult cinema and questions of taste.I am also currently working on two other research projects. The first is a joint project with Marta Pérez Pereiro, assistant professor in the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the Universidade de Santiago (USC), on the comedy of resistance in emerging nations, for an upcoming publication on Iberian Studies. The second is a forthcoming article, which will hopefully be published in the North American Journal of Welsh Studies, entitled: ‘All Quiet on the Welsh Western Front’. A re-examination of the wartime propaganda film The Silent Village.

Selected publications:      ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us (Twin

                                              Town and the Welsh underclass) in ‘Wales on

                                               Screen’ Steve Blandford (ed.) Seren 2000

‘The Gerwin at Ealing: Re-reading the role of the Welsh working class in the post war consensus film Llafur :Journal of Welsh Peoples History 2010, Vol 10, number 3

Selected Conference Papers:

Coming Up Cymru: the role of film in creating a virtual Wales NAASWCH 2006

Swansea University July 2006

‘Some things in their natural state have the most vivid colour: subversive re-readings of The Wicker Man’ Subversive Re/viewing: Readings, Communities and Practices University of Gloucestershire December 2006

‘But your still f**king peasants’: class and the post-Fordist sit-com’. WHAT HAVE YOU GOT IN THAT BOX? Salford University May 2007

‘Avant-trash or when cult went to college: British counter cultural cinema of the 1970’s’ Cine-Excess 11 (ICA London May 2008)

‘The Gwerin at Ealing: the role of the Welsh in the post-war British national project of Michael Balcon’ NAASWCH 2008 University of Toronto July 2008

‘All Quiet on the Western Welsh Front: Poetry and Propaganda in the Silent Village (Jennings: 1943)’ NAASCH 2010 Marymount University Virginia USA July 2010

The funny ‘others’. Stereotype and resistance in the humour of the emerging nations of Europe: a comparative analysis between Wales and Galicia, (with Dr. Marta Perez Pereiro). XV forum for Iberian Studies: National Identities at the Intersection 20/22nd June 2012

‘They can’t stop us singing’! Nostalgia, Class and Regionalism in the Representation of Contemporary Wales in Film and Television. The North American Association for the Study of Welsh History and Culture: International Conference, Bangor University, 26-28 July 2012.

Main teaching areas

at University of Glamorgan:        

Silent Cinema (year one), British Cinema, European Cinema, TV Genres (year two) and Cult Cinema

and Dissertation module in year three. Post-Grad: MA (Scriptwriting) and MA (Moving Image).

Tutor and consultant on the 2012 Chapter Arts Centre, ‘Silence is Golden’, film season and course open to public.

Membership of professional bodies:    -MECCSA and the BFI

1992: University of Wales Diploma in General Studies (Coleg Harlech)

1996: BA (Hons.) Combined Studies (University of Glamorgan)