Charles Barr

Charles Barr's career spans the first half-century and more of academic film studies in the UK, starting with postgraduate research in the 1960s at London University under Thorold Dickinson, the director/scholar who became Britain's first Film professor. After working as a secondary school teacher and in educational television, he came to UEA in 1976, funded initially by the British Film Institute as part of their strategy of setting up experimental lectureships in promising institutions. The then School of English and American Studies proved to be fertile ground because of its strong interdisciplinary ethos, and the presence already of sympathetic figures, notably Thomas Elsaesser. Along with Thomas (who later moved to Amsterdam), and subsequently Andrew Higson (who would move to York), Charles helped to develop a wide range of programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level, including from 1990 the pioneering M.A. in Film Archiving, which for two decades had a formative influence within the field, in Britain and far beyond.

After leaving UEA in 2006, he continued to teach full-time for five years, at Washington University in St Louis and then in Dublin and Galway, followed by three years of part-time work as Professorial Research Fellow in Film and Irish Studies at St Mary's University, Twickenham. Now based firmly back in Norwich, he keeps going, as of 2024, with bits of research and writing, while his children work busily in varied branches of the media.

Many of his own publications have been in the field of British cinema, including Ealing Studios (1977, and two updates) and the edited collection All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (1986); he also co-authored, with Stephen Frears, the programme Typically British (1995), part of Channel 4's celebration of the centenary of cinema. More recently, his main work has been on Alfred Hitchcock: English Hitchcock (1999), the BFI Classic on Vertigo (new edition, 2012), and Hitchcock: Lost and Found: the Forgotten Films (2015, co-authored with the Parisian scholar Alain Kerzoncuf). Latest books are The Call of the Heart: John M Stahl and Hollywood Melodrama (2018, co-edited with Bruce Babington, with UEA’s Melanie Williams among the contributors), and A Very Short Introduction to British Cinema (2022, part of OUP’s long-running VSI series)

Recent articles have included several on John Ford, and on cricket history, and he continues to do seasonal work as a proof-reader for Wisden Cricketers' Almanack.