Conference Organisers

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Nathan Abrams is a Professor in Film at Bangor University as well as the lead director for the Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studies and co-convener of the British Jewish Contemporary Cultures network. He lectures, writes and broadcasts widely (in English and Welsh) on British and American popular culture, history film and intellectual culture. He co-founded Jewish Film and New Media: An International Journal and his most recent books are Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (with Robert Kolker, Oxford University Press, 2019), Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (IB Tauris; Rutgers University Press, 2012), as well as co-editing books on the New Wave, New Hollywood: Reassessment, Recovery, and Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Alien Legacies: The Evolution of the Franchise (Oxford University Press, 2023) with Gregory Frame. His most recent work focuses on legendary film director Stanley Kubrick but he is also interested in issues of sustainability and the environment, exploring single-use plastic pollution and its solution.

 

Elizabeth Miller is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Bangor University. She received her PhD in Film Studies from King’s College London, with her research consisting primarily of feminist and sociocultural approaches to women in French cinema from the 1950s to the 1970s. She has published in Studies in French Cinema, Studies in European Cinema and Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, with forthcoming publications in French Screen Studies and Modern and Contemporary France. She is currently co-editing “More human than human:" A Cultural Heritage of Blade Runner for Liverpool University Press with Nathan Abrams and Christopher L. Robinson. She also co-organised the interdisciplinary conferences Women in the Wake of May 68 (King’s College London, 2018) and Blade Runner @40: Origins and Legacies (Bangor University, 2022).

 

Student Helpers

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Max Martin recently graduated from Bangor University with a First in Film Studies and will begin an MA in Film and Television at the University of Bristol in September.

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Ioannis Triantafyllidis is a filmmaker and incoming third-year student in Film Studies at Bangor University.  

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Panelists

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David Barnouw (1949) is an independent scholar and emeritus researcher at the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. His areas of interest are the Second World War in Europe, documentaries, memory, representation, monuments & museums. He has written more than fifteen books and dozens of articles on World War II subjects. He has given lectures at Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, UCLA, WestPoint etc. He has been visiting professor at the University of Vermont in Burlington (2008 and 2012). He is a renowned expert on Anne Frank and follows her emergence as a global phenomenon and what this means for her historical person as well as for her legacy as a symbol of the Holocaust. His book The Phenomenon of Anne Frank (originally in Dutch) was translated into German (2015), English (2018) and Italian (2021). He is active in the field of History & Film, (former) chairperson of the Dutch Society for History, Image and Sound and an active member of IAMHIST (International Association of Media and History). Within the framework of IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), he organized within IDFA 2005 a dozen screenings of WW II- propaganda documentaries from more than ten different countries.

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Shai Biderman (PhD, Philosophy; Boston University, 2012) is an Assistant Professor for film and philosophy at Beit-Berl College and Tel Aviv University (Israel). He is the co-editor of The Philosophy of David Lynch (UPK, 2011), Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image (Walflower/Columbia, 2016) and Plato and the Moving Image (Brill, 2019). He published numerous articles and book chapters in film-philosophy and philosophy of film, on filmmakers (such as David Lynch, Robert Zemeckis, Steven Soderbergh, the Coen Brothers, the Marx brothers, and Errol Morris) and on various films and TV shows (such as Gone baby, Gone, Lost, Family Guy, South Park, Twin Peaks, and Black Mirror).

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Eyal Boers (PhD, Film Studies; Tel Aviv University, 2022) (born July 1975) is an Israeli film director, producer and researcher. In 2022, Boers authored the thesis The Jew in Dutch Cinema: images, stereotypes and national identity, under the supervision of Prof. Ilan Avisar, at Tel-Aviv University. He wrote, produced and directed the short drama ‘A Lone Soldier’ (2007), and the documentaries Classmates of Anne Frank (2008) and Live or Die in Entebbe (2012). In 2011, he was appointed head of the film and television track at Ariel University's School of Communication. In 2018, he was appointed chairman of the Israel Film Council.

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Dr Marco-Benoît Carbone (PhD Intercultural Studies, University College London) is a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University London – College of Business, Arts, and Social Sciences. His research has looked at the themes of identity and otherness in areas that include film, digital media, gender and pornography, and animal and monstrosity studies. He authored the monographs Tentacle Erotica (Milan: Mimesis, 2013) and Geographies of Myth (London: Bloomsbury 2022). He is on the Editorial Board of film journals Cinergie and JICMS.

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Mateja Djedovic is a director who has worked on several short films and an award-winning children's opera. He is also a film scholar who has taken part in a number of international conferences in Cambridge, London, and Belgrade. His latest published papers include ‘Utopia Gone Wrong: Mirages of Yugoslavia in the Clockwork Mirror’ in the Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television and ‘Ken Russell and Dennis Potter: An Extraordinary Parallel’ in the book Re-Focus: The Films of Ken Russell published by Edinburgh University Press.

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Dr Rita (Rwita) Dutta is a Professor, Film Critic and Editor. She teaches at a college of Calcutta University. A member of the International Film Critics Association (Fipresci, based in Munich, Germany) and Editor of the International Film Journal ‘FilmBuff’ (www.filmbuff.org.in), she has visited many international film festivals worldwide as a Juror in Cannes, Busan, Kyiv, Cairo, Kerala, Osian’s Cinefan, Nepal, Aswan, Ukraine, Dubai, Italy. Also delivered lectures in Istanbul, Almaty, Poland, East Europe, China, Brazil, Germany, Romania and a few other places at home and abroad. She has contributed to various national and international publications. Her articles have been published in Spain, France and several other  European and Indian Journals. Recently, she was on the editorial board of a publication named ‘Critics on India Cinema’ which has been published recently and is available online. She is editing two books simultaneously on Contemporary Indian Cinema and Mrinal Sen.

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Cary Edwards is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Derby, a Teaching and Learning Coach at Boston College (UK) and the author of The Vigilante Thriller: Violence, Spectatorship and Identification in American Cinema, 1970-76 (2022). He has contributed to New Wave, New Hollywood: Reassessment, Recovery, and Legacy (eds. Abrams, N & Frame, G, 2021) and has previously written for Bright Lights Film Journal, Horror Homeroom and Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural. He attained his PhD in Film and Media from the University of Lincoln in 2018. His main research interests concern violence and spectatorship in mainstream cinema.

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Martin Holtz earned an MA and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Greifswald in Germany. He has published two books: American Cinema in Transition: The Western in New Hollywood and Hollywood Now (2011) and Constructions of Agency in American Literature on the War of Independence: War as Action, 1775-1860 (2019). He currently teaches American literature and film at the University of Graz in Austria.

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Dr Karen A Ritzenhoff is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Central Connecticut State University in the USA. She is currently also serving as co-Chair of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Ritzenhoff is teaching a regular course on ‘women and film’ and is interested in the work of independent directors such as Paul Verhoeven and Michael Haneke. She has co-edited an anthology on Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn (Lexington Press, 2015) with Catriona McAvoy. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442253537/Selling-Sex-on-Screen-From-Weimar-Cinema-to-Zombie-Porn.

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Ian Westbrook, 58, lives in Bangor and works in IT. He is a lifelong film fan and a great fan of science fiction literature. 

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Blake Wilson publishes in the areas of philosophy of law, popular culture, and political philosophy. He co-edited the book The Philosophy of Werner Herzog (Lexington 2020). He has contributed to Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy, The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy, and The Who and Philosophy. His journal publications have featured his research on filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, the counterrevolutionary theory of Carl Schmitt, and Hegel’s political theory. As an associate professor of criminal justice at California State University, Stanislaus, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on constitutional law, jurisprudence, legal studies, and critical criminology. 

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