Prof Lorna Jowett

Lorna is a Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Northampton, where she co-leads the Centre for Cultural and Literary Studies and is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Lorna received their English Literature undergraduate degree from the University of Durham, where they also completed a PhD in American poetry. Lorna joined the University of Northampton in 1996 as a Lecturer in American Studies before moving into Media and eventually leading the Film and Television Studies programme and then the Film, Media and Communications subject area.

Over the last 25 years, Lorna has published widely on television, film and popular culture, has have led an AHRC-funded network project as PI, coordinated six conferences, and has served as president of the scholarly Association for the Study of Buffy+.Their research has been featured in the Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Vice UK, Fangoria, The Conversation, the Guardian, and on the BBC Woman’s Hour programme.

Lorna is the author of the books Dancing With the Doctor: Dimensions of Gender in the Doctor Who Universe (2017) and Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan (2005), as well as co-author with Stacey Abbott of TV Horror (2013), with whom they co-edited Global TV Horror (2021). She has published many articles on television, film and popular culture.

Key areas of research are:

• genre in media, particularly horror and science fiction
• representation and gender identities
• representation, diversity and inequality in media industries

Lorna has led or currently leads the following Media modules:

• MED1084 Writing the Media
• MED2078 Researching for Media
• MED3017 Global Television
• MED3008 Horror on Screen
• MED4037 Final Major Project
• MED4029 Film & Screen Studies Dissertation.

They have also taught on the English MA and regularly contribute to the Graduate School’s Researcher Development programme of workshops and events.

• Michael Starr; The Nomadology of H G Wells: A philosophical investigation into the ways in which the fiction and criticism of Wells interrogate the future of the human. (completed)
• Jasmine Shadrack; Denigrata Cervorum: Interpretive Performance Autoethnography and Female Black Metal Performance. (completed)
• Anna Maria Everding; Locating Postcolonial Cinema: Notions of Place and Belonging in Hindi Cinema and British South Asian Cinema (completed)
• Alba De Bejar Muinos; Diasporic Technobodies: Tracing the Genealogy of the Cyborg through Cinema and Literature. Feminist and Postcolonial Contestations (completed)
• Maurici Jimenez; Cultural versus Commercial: The Catalan Film Industry (completed)
• Anthony Stepniak; Wicked Queen (completed)
• Cavan McLaughlin; Occultural production as re-visionary mythmaking.
• Jemima Bratley; Sapphic Existence in Historical Fiction
• Steven Turner; Cosmic fiction or social horror - examining structural and social anxieties in ‘Lovecraftian’ cinema

• University EDI Forum

Lorna is a member of the editorial board of Intensities: the Journal of Cult Media; Monstrum, journal of the Montréal Monstrum Society and Slayage: the international journal of Buffy+, as well as a member of the editorial board for the B-TV: Television Under the Critical Radar book series (Bloomsbury) and the peer review board for the World of Whedon book series, (McFarland). They regularly review for a number of academic journals including Critical Studies in Television and The Journal of Popular Television and publishers such as Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan across a broad spectrum of television, film and genre areas.

Member of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA), British Association for Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS), British Association of American Studies (BAAS) and charter member of the Association for the STudy of Buffy+.