Biography
I have been a PhD student at Sussex since February 2018 studying the figure of the witch in American cinema, supervised by Katherine Farrimond and Sue Thornham. I conceive of the witch as a multivalent image, capable of expressing both patriarchal fears and feminist fantasies surrounding female unruliness, and thus turn to the witch as a site of struggle between these subversive and conservative impulses. Through analysis of film texts from horror to fantasy to romantic comedy, I explore the ways in which disorderly femininity is constructed and negotiated within these varying narratives. My focus particularly is the ways in which representations of woman as witch have changed throughout history, and what these changes suggest about shifting cultural attitudes to women and feminisms.
This research project is the product of my enduring interest in the gothic, the horrific, and the monstrous, particularly as they manifest in cinema and where they relate to issues of gender and sexuality. Previous research projects have focused on the lesbian vampire trend in the early 1970s Anglo-American cinema, the cinematic history of the artificial woman, and women in 1990s Japanese horror film.
Alongside my research I have taught on the Film Analysis and British Cinema modules as a seminar tutor.
I can be found on twitter @ameliacr0wther.
Qualifications
PhD in Gender Studies (Humanities), University of Sussex (Current)
Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (2019)
MA in Film Studies: Popular Cinema (Distinction), Oxford Brookes University (2017)
BA (Hons) in Film and Television Studies (1st class), University of East Anglia (2016)
Activities
Conference papers
Folk Horror in the 21st Century, Falmouth University, September 2019.
'The witch and the woods: constructing the unruly female body in twenty-first century North American cinema'
Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations, University of Glasgow, May 2019.
'The legacy of the witch hag: female monstrosity as feminist resistance in North American cinema'
Reimagining the Gothic with a Vengeance, vol 5: Returns, Revenge, Reckonings, University of Sheffield, May 2019.
'Feminist retribution and patriarchal guilt in contemporary North American cinema's vengeful ghost hag narratives'