ABOUT
Currently teaching at the University of Bristol, Stephen’s research is driven by a desire to investigate under-explored corners of film history. His doctoral thesis undertook a wide-ranging, historical analysis of a series of films produced in Australia between 1945 and 1960 by that ‘quintessentially British’ company, Ealing Studios, and will form the basis of his upcoming monograph, Ealing Abroad: Postwar British Cinema, Settler Colonialism and Ealing Studios in Australia, which is to be published by BFI/Bloomsbury in 2023.
As a dual Australian-British citizen, he has a particular interest in the intersection between the British and Australian cultural industries, notions of Australian identity in the British context, and the legacies of settler colonialism in Australia (and British settler colonialism more broadly). To that end, he serves as Co-Programmer for the London Australian Film Society & Festival, and Screenings Coordinator at the Menzies Australia Institute (King’s College London), where he devised and curated the annual Menzies Screening series, which focuses on expanding historical and contextual understandings of Australian and transnational cinema.
His next research project will consider the trajectory of ‘national cinemas’ in settler contexts, offering a comparative analysis of the development of national cinemas in Australia, Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand, from the 1950s to today. This wide-ranging project seeks to recalibrate approaches to settler national cinemas from cultural nationalist infused ‘local’ cinemas of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, to the more recent burgeoning of Indigenous cinema/s.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Australian cinema; British cinema; Indigenous cinemas; transnational cinema/s; settler colonialism; geology on film; early and silent cinema; film and media archiving.
EDUCATION
2018
PhD in Film Studies
King’s College London (UK)
2010
Master of Arts in Film Studies (with Film Archiving) – Distinction
University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK)
2008
Bachelor of Arts (Screen Studies) – Honours, 1st Class
Flinders University of South Australia (Adelaide, Australia)
Dr Stephen Morgan 