Ivan Phillips
Before becoming an Associate Dean in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, I ran the undergraduate Interactive Media and Screen Cultures programme there and this is still the focus of the majority of my teaching. I am also award leader on the MA Screen Cultures within the School's Postgraduate Media Programme, and have supervision responsibilities for several PhD students. I completed my own PhD on the poetry of Paul Muldoon at the University of Wales, Swansea, in 1998 and my interests span such subjects as Romanticism and its contexts, Gothic culture, Modernism into postmodernism, 20th/21st century poetry and poetics, and experimental fictions from Laurence Sterne to new media.
My research interests are the result of a slow, strange, magical hybridisation process in which a genetic inheritance of English Literature (BA, MA, PhD) has been subject to the effects of over 12 years of teaching students on practice-based courses specialising in Animation, Games Art, VFX, SFX, Model Making, Character Creation, Interactive Media, Screen Cultures, Photography, Fine Art, Graphic Design and Illustration...
So, although I retain a passionate interest in poetry, the novel, and theatrical drama, this has increasingly merged with other concerns and curiosities - some of which might have been frowned upon by my tutors when I was an undergraduate but which were always, really, part of the imaginative make-up of someone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s.
I'm interested in ideas of narrative, representation and politics across media forms, particularly where the traditional has been transformed through the emergence of a digital mass culture. I become most excited when I begin to suspect that forgotten, neglected or supposedly marginal figures have something to say to the contemporary world. For this reason, much of my work has been concerned with exploring new perspectives on writers and artists such as Thomas Chatterton, Dylan Thomas, David Jones and Wyndham Lewis.
My most recent research has considered aspects of the Gothic in relation to critical theory and new media perspectives - for instance, reflecting on mythologies of the vampire through theories of the interface or reading Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera (1910) as an expression of cultural anxieties within mass-mediated modernity. I'm also delighted that my childhood obsession with Doctor Who has finally been legitimised within an academic context and I co-organised a successful one-day symposium on the subject in November 2011. A full conference is now planned for the 50th anniversary in 2013.
More broadly, I'm interested in the cultural and political impact of media technologies, and have spent a number of years pondering - with my colleague, Alan Peacock - a theory of media that I call 'unsettlement'. This suggests that all media, when new, seem to undergo a period of unsettlement or radical instability, which is characterised by formal self-consciousness and experimentation. The early years of the printing press, of the novel, of photography, of cinema, of the computer, all provide evidence of this. An initial period of creative openness and cultural uncertainty is followed by absorption into a ‘mythic’ (in the Barthesian sense of the word) world-view, characterised by more settled and comfortable processes of narration, representation, reception. Once a medium has been culturally assimilated, the restless energies of its inception are diverted into marginal practices which nevertheless inform and, at times of major political or cultural change, challenge the mainstream.
There might be a book in that. Or a few articles at least.
On the subject of books, I'm currently pondering monographs on poetry and technology, and on traditions of materiality within Gothic spectacle. I might even do something about these one day.
I also write plays, poetry and fictional prose. My novel, Johnny Face-Ache, hasn't been published (yet!) but poems have appeared in various small press journals and my one-act plays have been performed, with some success, at drama festivals.
SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS
‘Dark Machines and Electric Flames: technopoetics from the romantic age to the digital age’, at Perspectives on Narrative in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, SSAHRI Conference, Weds 19 November 2008.
‘The Vampire in the Machine: exploring the undead interface’, at Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture, University of Hertfordshire 16-18 April 2010.
'The Vampire with a Thousand Faces: towards a physiognomy of the undead', at Vampires: Myths of the Past and the Future, International Conference, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 2-4 November 2011.
'The Phantom of the Media: Erik, the Gesamtkunstwerk, and the spectacle of unsettlement', Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy, International Conference, University of Sussex, 8-9 December 2011.
‘The Vam
Address: School of Creative Arts,
University of Hertfordshire,
College Lane,
Hatfield,
Hertfordshire,
ENGLAND,
AL10 9AB
My research interests are the result of a slow, strange, magical hybridisation process in which a genetic inheritance of English Literature (BA, MA, PhD) has been subject to the effects of over 12 years of teaching students on practice-based courses specialising in Animation, Games Art, VFX, SFX, Model Making, Character Creation, Interactive Media, Screen Cultures, Photography, Fine Art, Graphic Design and Illustration...
So, although I retain a passionate interest in poetry, the novel, and theatrical drama, this has increasingly merged with other concerns and curiosities - some of which might have been frowned upon by my tutors when I was an undergraduate but which were always, really, part of the imaginative make-up of someone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s.
I'm interested in ideas of narrative, representation and politics across media forms, particularly where the traditional has been transformed through the emergence of a digital mass culture. I become most excited when I begin to suspect that forgotten, neglected or supposedly marginal figures have something to say to the contemporary world. For this reason, much of my work has been concerned with exploring new perspectives on writers and artists such as Thomas Chatterton, Dylan Thomas, David Jones and Wyndham Lewis.
My most recent research has considered aspects of the Gothic in relation to critical theory and new media perspectives - for instance, reflecting on mythologies of the vampire through theories of the interface or reading Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera (1910) as an expression of cultural anxieties within mass-mediated modernity. I'm also delighted that my childhood obsession with Doctor Who has finally been legitimised within an academic context and I co-organised a successful one-day symposium on the subject in November 2011. A full conference is now planned for the 50th anniversary in 2013.
More broadly, I'm interested in the cultural and political impact of media technologies, and have spent a number of years pondering - with my colleague, Alan Peacock - a theory of media that I call 'unsettlement'. This suggests that all media, when new, seem to undergo a period of unsettlement or radical instability, which is characterised by formal self-consciousness and experimentation. The early years of the printing press, of the novel, of photography, of cinema, of the computer, all provide evidence of this. An initial period of creative openness and cultural uncertainty is followed by absorption into a ‘mythic’ (in the Barthesian sense of the word) world-view, characterised by more settled and comfortable processes of narration, representation, reception. Once a medium has been culturally assimilated, the restless energies of its inception are diverted into marginal practices which nevertheless inform and, at times of major political or cultural change, challenge the mainstream.
There might be a book in that. Or a few articles at least.
On the subject of books, I'm currently pondering monographs on poetry and technology, and on traditions of materiality within Gothic spectacle. I might even do something about these one day.
I also write plays, poetry and fictional prose. My novel, Johnny Face-Ache, hasn't been published (yet!) but poems have appeared in various small press journals and my one-act plays have been performed, with some success, at drama festivals.
SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS
‘Dark Machines and Electric Flames: technopoetics from the romantic age to the digital age’, at Perspectives on Narrative in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, SSAHRI Conference, Weds 19 November 2008.
‘The Vampire in the Machine: exploring the undead interface’, at Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture, University of Hertfordshire 16-18 April 2010.
'The Vampire with a Thousand Faces: towards a physiognomy of the undead', at Vampires: Myths of the Past and the Future, International Conference, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 2-4 November 2011.
'The Phantom of the Media: Erik, the Gesamtkunstwerk, and the spectacle of unsettlement', Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy, International Conference, University of Sussex, 8-9 December 2011.
‘The Vam
Address: School of Creative Arts,
University of Hertfordshire,
College Lane,
Hatfield,
Hertfordshire,
ENGLAND,
AL10 9AB
less
InterestsView All (19)
Uploads
Papers by Ivan Phillips