Dr Maria Flood PhD

I have a monograph commissioned with Edinburgh University Press, entitled Extremism on Screen: Ethics, Emotion, and World Cinemas after 9/11, and due for publication in 2024. This is based on my research project, funded by the British Academy, titled ‘Radical Screens: The Making of the Terrorist’, and considers the work of contemporary documentary filmmakers who depict terrorism, radicalization, and political extremism. I consider how these films represent emotion, and how emotions generated by the formal properties of film (narrative, cinematography, genre, and temporality), and their impact on a spectator’s apprehension of the political messages of the films in question. Theories of cinematic ethics will also underpin much of this analysis, in relation to the extreme violence depicted, the position of the filmmaker, and the potential for the humanization of the perpetrator. As part of my research on extremism and cinema, I also co-organized a conference entitled ‘The Figure of the Terrorist in Literature, Film and Media’ with Dr Michael Frank of Zurich University 8th and 9th November, 2019. This conference led to an edited volume, under contract with Edinburgh University Press, which we are currently editing and is due for publication in early 2022.

My monograph France, Algeria, and the Moving Image: Screening Histories of Violence (1962–2010), is the first book to offer a comparative examination of French and Algerian film through a series of original close readings of canonical and transnational directors. In this book I examined the gendered dimensions of political violence and resistance, conceptualizing a form of ‘world’ cinema that eschews overt visual representations of violence within a postcolonial context of on-going tension. I have published more widely on French and Algerian cinema, including gender, resistance and violence in the Algerian Civil War, torture and ethics of spectatorship, and documentaries and the 17 October 1961 massacre.
I am currently a co-investigator and UK contact for Algeria on the successful project, ‘Maghreb Action on Displacement and Rights’ (MADAR), a major Network Plus grant bid of up to £2 million, funded by the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund, and led by Dr. Mariangela Palladino (Keele). The project focuses on the challenges posed at political, policy, societal and cultural levels by migration from Sub-Saharan Africa and Syria to the Maghreb region. The key point is the deployment of arts-based and creative methods (e.g., film-making, photography, crafts, pottery, theatre, etc.) as modes of engagement with displaced peoples.

While most of my publications relate to the field of Francophone postcolonial film, my research and teaching interests more broadly encompass intersectional gender, race, and sexuality studies. As such, I have published Moonlight: Screening Black Queer Youth, which will be part of Routledge’s ‘Cinema and Youth Cultures’ series, co-edited by Yannis Tzioumakis. To date, it promises to be the first book-length study of the film examining Moonlight’s position in relation to African American youth film, queer cinema, critical race theory, and queer theory. My interest in Moonlight arose out of my interest in identity and structural violence, my students’ engagement with the film on my module ‘Race and Sexuality on Screen’, as well as my work on the ‘Decolonizing the Curriculum’ forum. Youth and coming-of-age narratives also form a key strand of the Extremism on Screen project.