Professor Sally Faulkner will be giving her inaugural lecture on Wednesday 9 December.

Professor Sally Faulkner to give her inaugural lecture, ‘Middlebrow Cinema: Between Literature and Film in 20th-Century Spain’, on Wednesday 9 December.

Professor Faulkner’s lecture will comprise of two parts: the first half will explore the neglect of the middlebrow, from Virginia Woolf to contemporary Film Studies; the second part will consider the cross-cultural translation of this term to Spanish culture. 

The lecture is inspired by Professor Faulkner’s experience of founding and directing the College of Humanities Centre for Translating Cultures, which examined the idea of cultural transfer more generally, and also by the Middlebrow Cinema project, which explored the concept of the middlebrow in Spanish film and for which she received an AHRC Fellowship award.

Professor Faulkner’s lecture also draws on her forthcoming edited volume ‘Middlebrow Cinema’, which is the maiden' book of Routledge's brand new Film Studies series, 'Remapping World Cinema: Regional Tensions and Global Transformations'.

‘Middlebrow Cinema’ challenges an often uninterrogated hostility towards middlebrow culture that frequently dismisses it as conservative, feminized or middle-class. The volume defines the term relationally against shifting concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’, and considers its deployment in connection with text, audience and institution.

Professor Faulkner comments, “The lecture will focus on how, in arguing for this cross-cultural translation, I develop a new interpretation of Spanish film in the period of Spain's Transition to democracy. I argue for Spanish film of the period not as a culture of compliance (an accusation often levelled at popular film) nor as a politicized culture of dissent (the classic interpretation of art film) but as part of a previously unexplored middlebrow culture that anticipated change, and can therefore be seen as a rehearsal for democracy”. 

Full details for Prof. Faulkner’s inaugural lecture can be found on the Humanities Events page.

Date: 2 December 2015

Read more University News