Research Team

I’m a media and television scholar working at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC), Cardiff University. My research interests are in cultures of television production, creative labour and public interventions within the screen sector.

In 2019 Ruth and I published Producing Television Drama: Local Production in a Global Era with Palgrave Macmillan. This book examines the relationships between international television markets and the specific national and regional production contexts from which television drama emerges.

I’ve also published in journals such as the Journal of Popular Television, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Media History and European Journal of Cultural Studies and I have co-edited a collection on Cultural Work and Higher Education (2013, Palgrave Macmillan). I’m on the steering group for the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations.

More details on my academic background and specialist interests can be found here.

Being Irish and having lived for a time in Scotland and now Wales, my interest in small nations is both academic and personal. These nations and their cultures are marked by a profound sense of place, often imagined in relation to other nations. For these nations film and television are central to how their stories travel within and beyond their borders. The research that we do in Small Nations Screen is about working collaboratively with a range of partners in order to build the sustainability and diversity of these sectors and their stories.

I’m Faculty Head of Research and Professor of Creative Industries at the University of South Wales. I’m also co-director of the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations.

My research focuses upon cultural identity, cultural difference and television. As a researcher, I am intrigued by the formation of human belongings, whether in relation to specific spaces – such as the domestic home – or to wider entities such as nations or empires. The efforts to create, sustain and negotiate such belongings form the basis of my research career to date.

In 2015 I was Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded ‘Television in Small Nations’. I worked closely with academic and industry partners in Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland and Wales to bring together scholars, policy makers,TV producers and broadcasters to examine some of the main challenges and strategies in the contemporary TV production ecology of small nations, principally in Western Europe.

I’m the editor of the volume Contemporary British Television Crime Drama: Cops on the Box (Routledge, 2017) and co-editor of Life on Mars: From Manchester to New York (University of Wales Press, 2012).  I’ve also published in a range of journals including European Journal of Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Television, International Journal of Cultural Policy and Television and New Media.  My full list of publications and research activities can be found here.

I joined the project in December 2019. My research examines issues of gender, subjectivity and nationhood, with a particular focus on the former Eastern Bloc. Previous and upcoming publications have reflected on the reactions to Pussy Riot as a case of ‘return of the repressed’, the status of memory objects and museums in the proliferation of post-socialist nostalgia in East Germany, at the vicissitudes of queer (in)visibility, the critical potential of irony and satire, and cinema and memory.

Prior to joining this project, I was a fellow at the London School of Economics & Political Science, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Baltic & East European Studies (CBEES) at Södertörn University, Sweden, and a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded project ‘A Quiet Revolution? Discursive Representations of Non-Heteronormative Sexuality in Russia’.

More information about my research and publications can be found here.

Roderik Smits was Postdoctoral Researcher on the project for 12 months from October 2018. He is now a post-doctoral fellow at Film University Babelsberg, Germany.

Roderik is author of the book Gatekeeping in the Evolving Business of Independent Film Distribution (2019, Palgrave Macmillan).