Department Links
Quick Links
Christopher Gittings, Ph.D. (Edinburgh)
Chair of Film Studies
Office: UC 78
Phone: 519-661-2111 ext. 85781
Email: gittings@uwo.ca
Teaching in 2011/2012
On leave.
Teaching in 2010/2011
Film 3311G: ST: Family Viewing: Melodrama
Film 9373: Theories of National Cinema (Grad course Fall term)
Areas of Interest:
Film Studies/Cultural Studies/Literary Studies: CanadianCinemas, First Nations Cinemas, film theory, genre theory, critical theory, criticalrace studies, gender and sexuality, national cinema, postcolonial theory, documentary,melodrama, class, ideology.
Supervision:
I am available to supervise graduate student dissertations in the following areas:
• Canadian cinemas
• First Nations cinemas
• national cinema debates
• postcolonial theory
• postmodernism
• class
• ideology
• cultural memory
• film theory
• genre
• documentary
• melodrama
• race and representation
• gender and sexuality
Graduate Dissertation Supervisions to date:
MA
• The Im/Possibility of a Canadian Genre Cinema. In progress at the University of Western Ontario.
• Cinema of the Social: Stars, Fans and the Standardization of Genre in Tamil Cinema. Completed and defended at the University of Western Ontario, August 2011.
• Re-framing Trauma: Photographs and Memory in Alanis Obomsawin’s Documentaries. Completed and defended at the University of Western Ontario, August 2010.
Ph D
• Divided Land, Divided Bodies: Representations of Nationalism and Violence in Literature and Films on the Partition of India Completed and defended at the University of Western Ontario, May 2007
• Miss Canada: Political Cartoons and the Construction of Nation. Completed and defended at University of Alberta, October 2005
• The American Hobo-Sexual: A Connective History in Material Queer Culture. Completed and defended at the University of Alberta, August 2003.
• A Different Kind of Truth’: Fictionality in the Novels of John Irving. Completed and defended at University of Birmingham, UK May 2001.
• Cultural Politics and Canadian Writing: Destabilising Essentialist Identities in Atwood, Marlatt, Shields, and their Foremothers. Completed and defended at University of Birmigham, UK February 1999.
Selected Publications:
• "Activism and Aesthetics: The Work of John Greyson." In Great Canadian Film Directors ed, George Melnyk. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007: 124-147.
• Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference and Representation (2002);
• ed., Imperialism and Gender: Constructions of Masculinity (1996);
• articles on cultural translation, gender, sexuality, genre, postcolonialisms, postmodernisms, popular culture, national cinemas, ethnographic cinemas and race and nation in Essays On Canadian Writing, Studies in Short Fiction, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Glasgow Review, Kunapipi, Canadian Journal of Communication, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Cinema Journal, British Journal of Canadian Studies and Australian Canadian Studies.
Honors and Distinctions:
• Director of the Center for Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham, England (1996-97);
• Editorial Board, Cultural Spaces (UTP).
Work in Progress:
the films of the Empire Marketing Board; gender and genre in the films of the Coen Brothers; John Greyson’s queer pan-textualism: history, translation, aesthetics.