MEET THE TEAM

Much of the PhD studies will involve iconography. The proposed title of the project is Writing and Sign: Performance and Display of Social Identity.

Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct from artistic style. The word iconography comes from the Greek εἰκών ("image") and γράφειν ("to write").

In art history, "an iconography" may also mean a particular depiction of a subject in terms of the content of the image, such as the number of figures used, their placing and gestures.

The term is also used in many academic fields other than art history, for example semiotics and media studies, and in general usage, for the content of images, the typical depiction in images of a subject, and related senses.

I believe, at present, I have a supervising team. I was under the impression that Professors John Hall and Jerome Fletcher were it; however, I am informed that my supervising team will include Dr. Dario Llinares as Director of Studies and Professor Phil Stenton  as Second Supervisor. I do not know if they are instead of or in addition to Fletcher and Hall. However it works out, it is quite an array of talent. I'm not sure I'm up to being in such company.

Here are a few stats on the team:

Jerome Fletcher:

Research interests

I am part of the Performance Writing Research Group at the University, investigating multi-modal forms of writing in contemporary social and artistic contexts.

At present I am awaiting the outcome of an AHRC Large Grant bid on Interactivity and Performativity submitted in conjunction with a number of UK universities including Dundee, Edinburgh Napier and Bedfordshire, as well as European universities (Bergen and Potsdam) and external partners. My role within the project will be a praxis-based investigation of how performativity functions within digital text apparatuses. This will involve the development of new works of digital text in collaboration with Random House digital publishing, Echo Network Productions and others. This project comes off the back of the ELMCIP project (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity in Practice). This was a three-year European-funded project researching e-literature and networked communities in which I was a Principal Investigator. My outcomes included:

1. Falmouth Conference/workshop at Arnolfini, Bristol. This specifically addressed the relationship between e-literature and performance, performativity across the digital environment and the location of the body in digital text performance.

2. Curation of performances at Remediating the Social, the final conference in Edinburgh (December 2012).

3. Editing an issue of Performance Research Journal dedicated to e-literature and performance in the European context.

4. A survey of e-literature performance contexts.

For more information see www.elmcip.net

Current research/forthcoming outputs

•    On Performance Writing. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (editor). October 2013

•    ‘The Fetch’. Live digital performance. Centre Pompidou, Paris. ELO conference. September 2013

•    ‘Does Digital Literature Need a Theory of Language?’ Conference paper. ELO conference Paris September 2013

•    ‘Taptoe’. Digitally augmented drumming/writing performance with Adam Loveday-Edwards and Thanos Polymeneas-Liontiris. Fascinate Conference. Falmouth University. September 2013

•    Writing & Poor Techno-Theatre. Weekend workshop at 4 Days performance festival. Arnolfini Bristol. September 2013

•    'On First Hearing Oswald's Homer'. Book chapter in Soundings: Critical Essays on Alice Oswald. (Publisher and date tbc)

Recent outputs

•    'Offshore of Writing - E-literature and the Island' in Dicthung Digital, peer-reviewed online journal. Winter 2012

•    ‘Digital Text and Performance Writing’. Invited public lecture.Teatro y Cibercultura lecture series. University of Granada. April 2012

•    '...ha perdut la veu: Some reflections on the composition of e-literature as a minor literature' in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, vol. 4.1. October 2011 (issue co-edited with Dr Maria Mencia)

•    'Trac|tExt|ract' - performance/paper at E-Poetry, SUNY Buffalo, New York. May 2011

Selected earlier outputs

•    'Whisper Wire' - Collaborative multimedia performance with J.R. Carpenter, Inspace, Edinburgh. International Conference on Interactive Storytelling. November 2010

•    'E-composition|decompostion. Performance and Perlection' - Cybertext Yearbook - online peer-reviewed journal, August 2010

•    'Performance Writing - new developments'. Interventions: Literary Practice at the Edge Conference. Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. February 2010

Membership of learned societies, subject associations

•    Society of Authors

•    PEN International

Editorial boards

Journal of Writing in Creative Practice

Supervision of research degrees

Val Diggle, PhD student, Falmouth University
David Devanny, PhD student, Falmouth University
Shelley Hodgson, PhD student, Plymouth University (tbc)

Other matters of research relevance

•    Publication of The Decadent Sportsman, Dedalus Books. October 2012

•    Ongoing development of business-facing, practice-based arts courses in collaboration with AIR, Falmouth, Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, Brighton University, Goldsmiths and Ashridge Business School.

MFA development and supervision

Phil Stenton

Phil Stenton is Professor of Pervasive Media and Associate Dean for Research & Enterprise at the School of Media and Performance at University College Falmouth. Prior to this position, Phil was Director of Research at the Pervasive Media Studio. 

Phil has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Sheffield. He has 20 years of research management experience in the UK and the US. In 1984 he was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, before joining BT and eventually HP Labs. Until 1999 he managed a department in HP Labs working in mobile and appliance computing. He followed that with a temporary assignment to as R&D lab manager within an HP product division in the US. There, he set up a research lab to develop e-services technology.

Phil has served on a number of UK and European funding committees, interview panels and review boards and he was also director of the DTI's City & Buildings Research Centre which carried out the Mobile Bristol programme that engaged participants from across the creative and IT industries, educationalists, schoolchildren and members of the public.

Phil is a member of the Studio's Advisory Board and a Director of Calvium Ltd, a new start-up building on 70 years combined research experience at HP Labs.

Dr Dario Llinares

Academic interests

I attended Sheffield Hallam University between 1999 and 2002 studying Film History, Theory and Criticism. The course not only enhanced my fascination with all things cinema but introduced me to a wide range of cultural theory. After completing the BA I enrolled on an MA in Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University. This course deepened my interest in cultural and social theory, particularly structuralism and post-structuralism, notions of discourse and power, gender theory and links between representation and identity, which have influenced my teaching and research ever since. My MA thesis, entitled 'Contemporary Cinema and the Representation of Masculinity in Postmodern Society', interrogated expressions of masculine 'crisis' in films such as Fight Club, American Psycho and American Beauty.

After completing the MA, I began studying for a PhD at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (CIGS) at the University of Leeds. The Centre provided a challenging and exciting environment for postgraduate study and also gave me a grounding in gender theory and methodogy which informed my project.

Supervised by Professor Ruth Holliday (Director of Studies at CIGS) and Dr Denis Flannery (Senior Lecturer in American Literature), my thesis focused on cultural constructions of masculinity, developing ideas around how the media produces idealised iconographies and mythologies around particular masculine forms. I wanted my project to interrogate this process, how it worked, how discourses of power and gender hierarchies emerge, and how such meanings shift over time. I decided to focus my analysis on one specific image of idealised masculinity: The Astronaut. Each chapter deals with a different media form - photography, journalism, literature and film - and examines the textual and contextual dynamics which have served to embed the astronaut as an iconic figure in the cultural imaginary. I completed my viva on 27 November 2009 and graduated in July 2010. My thesis was published by Cambridge Scholars Press in August 2011 as a single authored monograph entitled The Astronaut: Cultural Mythology and Idealised Masculinity.

Throughout my PhD study I lectured on a part-time basis in Media, Communications and Culture (Leeds Metropolitan University), Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and Sociology (University of Leeds), and Television Studies (University of York). In my role as Senior Lecturer in Film at Falmouth, I teach on Criticism, Analysis, Theory (Level 1), Film, Postmodernity and New Media (Level 2) and British Cinema (Level 2).

Recent outputs

I co-organised a conference with Dr Zoe Thompson and Dr Fiona Philip entitled 'Austere Cultures/Cultures of Austerity: Reactions to the Erosion of Critical Spaces', which took place at Leeds Metropolitan University, 8-9 September 2011.

I co-edited a special edition of Journal of European Popular Culture (September 2012) and an edited collection which published the best work from the conference.

Current projects/forthcoming outputs

I am engaged in a range of ongoing research projects. I am also writing an article on representations of violence, masculinity and the prison as an arena of cinematic spectacle, focused on two British films: Hunger (McQueen, 2008) and Bronson (Refn, 2009) and am preparing to write a article on non-military heroism for a collection edited by Dr John Price.

Dr John Hall

John Hall is a poet, teacher and essayist.

He was born in the country now called Zambia in 1945 and moved to England in 1958, where he has lived ever since, mostly in Devon. His first poems to meet the attention of other writers appeared in The English Intelligencer in 1966. His first collection, Between the Cities, was published by Grosseteste in 1968. A number of other collections appeared between then and 1981.

A period of 'not writing', discussed in his 1992 article, 'Writing and Not Writing', followed. He began to produce visual poems, particularly from the mid 1990s.

He was a school teacher for five years (1971-1976) before moving to Dartington College of Arts (now part of Falmouth University), where he has worked in different capacities ever since. In the early years he was closely involved in the development of the Art and Social Context degree. He was Vice Principal Academic (or equivalent) between 1990 and 2002. He led the group that planned the Performance Writing degree for a 1994 start. In 2002 he took early retirement to be re-employed as Associate Director of Research.

John Hall is Professor of Performance Writing at Falmouth University and visiting professor at York St John University

Some work of John Hall's  apropos my interest in signage: