Ms Estella Tincknell

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  • Qualifications:BA (Hons), MA
  • Position:Associate Professor in Film and Culture
  • Department:Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education (ACE)
  • Telephone:+4411732 84306
  • Email:Estella.Tincknell@uwe.ac.uk

About me

I have taught at UWE for eighteen years, across both Film Studies and Media and Cultural Studies and at all levels, from undergraduate through MA to PhD.  I have led both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, and was Head of Department between 2006 and 2009.  I studied at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1980s, at a time when it was undertaking groundbreaking cross-disciplinary work, and have retained my interest in challenging academic boundaries and conventions.

I am a member of the Bristol History Commission set up by Bristol's Mayor Marvin Rees to address the legacies of Bristol's engagement in the Transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans. Related to this, I co-led a UWE-funded citywide research project with my UWE colleague, Professor Shawn Sobers, in 2021-22, Speaking Memories, which will lead to an exhibition at City Hall and an archive at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. 

I currently supervise PhD students on a range of topics broadly linked to film and media, and welcome applications and expressions of interest (especially in the areas of British film and television, music on screen, and aging and representation). I am a founding member of WAM (Women, Aging, Media), an international network of scholars and activists who combine research and publication with social impact (e.g. we contributed to two Parliamentary reports on older women in the British media which helped to change regulations on this issue). In that capacity I was a panellist for the Volkswagen Foundation interdisciplinary pan-European peer review panel: Challenges and Potentials for Europe: The Greying Continent, 2021-22.

I am currently researching a book provisionally titled Masculinity, Modernity and Myth in British Film and Television Crime Narratives. 

I was also co-editor of The Soundtrack, a journal of music and the moving image, between 2012 and 2016, and continue to research in this area.

In addition to my job at UWE, I was a Bristol City Councillor between 2013 and 2021, and was Deputy Mayor and Cabinet Member for Culture and Equalities between 2016 and 2017.

Area of expertise

My research interests are centred on four main areas: Popular film and media genres, especially representations of gender and identity within those forms; Music and cinema, including film musicals, film soundtracks, and popular music on screen; Aging, gender and culture, especially media representations of aging femininity and their associated discourses; British film and television, especially post-war histories and culture.  

I have written and published widely on these topics, and my most recent publications include: 'Tragic Blondes, Hollywood, and the "Radical Sixties" Myth: Seberg, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as Revisionist and Reparative Biopic,' Celebrity Studies, November 2022; 'Unpiecing the Jigsaw:  Compulsive Heterosexuality, Sex Crime, Class and Masculinity in Early 1960s British Cinema,' Journal of British Cinema and Television (April, 2021); 'Monstrous Aunties: the Rabelaisian Older Asian Woman in British Cinema and Television Comedy', Feminist Media Studies (April 2019); 'The Nation's Matron: Hattie Jacques and British Postwar Popular Culture', Journal of British Cinema and Television (January 2015); 'Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the Sunday Night Television Serial' Journal of British Cinema and Television (August 2013); Jane Campion and Adaptation: Angels, Demons and Unsettling Voices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Aging Femininities, Troubling Representations (Cambridge Scholars, 2012, with Dr J Dolan).

My research is informed by feminist and materialist traditions of critical analysis and a firm commitment to social transformation.

Publications

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