Fandom and Cult Media

Researchers in audiences, fandom and cult media are part of the Screen Cultures research group, part of the Birmingham Centre for Media Cultural Research (BCMCR) who investigate and write about screen-based media ranging from film and television to computer games, animation and the internet. Our research is necessarily diverse and explores all aspects of the production, distribution and consumption of screen media. You will be supervised by researchers with an international reputation and actively engaged in research around fandom and cult media.

Dr Oliver Carter researches and has published on the cultural and economic processes of European cult cinema fan production, ‘fantrepreneurship’, online file-sharing communities, fan filmmaking and the British hardcore pornography industry. In collaboration with research centre member Dr Simon Barber, Oliver Carter is also developing the Video Cultures research project, which investigates different aspects of cult film consumption.

Dr Inger Lise Bore is particularly interested in how audiences articulate cultural identities through their engagement with screen texts, and in how they express ideas of gender and nationality by talking about film or TV. Two of the issues she has focused on are perceptions of women in comedy and of national and transnational comedy.

Dr John Mercer is interested in the relationships between aesthetic and stylistic tropes and emotional affects across media texts but especially in the form often described as melodrama. John is the author (with Martin Shingler) of Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility a publication that is used internationally on Film Studies courses dealing with melodrama. John is the editor of the Journal of Gender Studies and on the editorial board of Sexualities and Cine Excess.