MrBenjamin Halligan

I took up the position of Director of the Doctoral College at the University of Wolverhampton in November 2015. I work to provide an outstanding research culture for our PhD, Professional Doctorate and MPhil research students — one that supports expanded access, transparency of assessment, vibrant research communities, skills and career development, and timely completions. I see my role as exclusively working for the research student experience, across all disciplines in the University, and across all aspects of the student journey and well-being. In the Postgraduate Experience Survey (PRES) of 2021, the University of Wolverhampton was placed an overall 5th in the UK for "Research Culture", 11th for professional development and 12th for satisfaction with supervision, and with some disciplinary areas coming 1st in the UK. The university led one of the thirteen UK networks awarded funding by the Office for Students in 2021 to enact a step-change in access to postgraduate research for historically marginalised groups (funding awarded: £798,667).

I have had three monographs published in the area of Film Studies / Film History:
• "Michael Reeves" from Manchester University Press (2003; second edition 2012)
• "Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film" from Berghahn (2016)
• "Hotbeds of Licentiousness: The British Glamour Film and the Permissive Society" from Berghahn (2022)

I have co-edited nine books, covering music and media, popular musicology, political philosophy and activism, film studies, and noise:
• "Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics", Ashgate, 2010, with Michael Goddard
• "Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise", Continuum, 2012, with Michael Goddard and Paul Hegarty
• "Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music", Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, with Michael Goddard and Nicola Spelman
• "The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop", Routledge, 2013, with Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs and Robert Edgar
• "The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment", Bloomsbury, 2015, with Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs, Robert Edgar and Nicola Spelman
• "Stories We Could Tell: Putting Words to American Popular Music", by David Sanjek, Routledge, 2019, posthumously co-edited with Tom Attah and Mark Duffett.
• "Politics of the Many: Contemporary Radical Thought and the Crisis of Agency", Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, with Rebecca Carson, Stefano Pippa and Alexei Penzin
• "Diva: Feminism and Fierceness from Pop to Hip-Hop", Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, with Shara Rambarran, Kirsty Fairclough and Nicole Hodges Persley
• "Adult Themes: British Cinema and the X-Rating in the Long 1960s", Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, with Christopher Weedman and Anne Etienne

My journal articles have appeared in TDR, Framework, Theory & Event, Cultural Politics, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Slovo, and Studies in East European Cinema. I’ve presented papers at academic conferences and film festivals in several countries, overseen and curated film retrospectives, appeared on BBC Radio 3's "Free Thinking" (episode on Soho, talking about my book "Hotbeds of Licentiousness") and BBC 6 Music (talking about "Diva"), and served on the jury of the Leeds International Film Festival. I’ve introduced and talked about the films of Michael Reeves around the world, and appeared in related documentaries. I peer review for a variety of journals and publishers, including Oxford University Press, Routledge, Bloomsbury, Palgrave and Manchester University Press, and I sit on the Editorial Board of the Palgrave Studies in Cultural Censorship series. I was returned to the Research Assessment Exercise in 2008, and the Research Excellence Framework in 2014 and 2021.

I previously worked at the universities of Aberystwyth (1994-2001), York St John (2001-2007) and Salford (2007-2015). At the latter institution I was Director of Postgraduate Research Studies for the College of Arts and Social Sciences. I completed my MPhil and PhD (supervised by Prof Ioan Williams) at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where I worked closely with John Hefin MBE (former Head of Drama, BBC Wales) and Prof Dame Elan Closs Stephens CBE (former Chair of the S4C Authority, currently Acting Chair of the BBC) in establishing and running a new degree in Film and Television Studies in 1997. I also co-founded (and named) the annual Ffresh Film Festival. I was involved in the bid preparation, formation and running of the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, across seven Higher Education institutions, which was awarded £14 million by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2014.

For details and downloads of my academic publications since 1998, please see: https://benjaminhalligan.com/
email: b.halligan[at]wlv.ac.uk