Film History; British cinema; Feminist media studies

Melanie Williams is a film and media historian, specialising in issues of gender, with a notable track record of research on British cinema. Her key publications in this area include the monographs Prisoners of Gender (2009), David Lean (2014), Female Stars of British Cinema: The Women in Question (2017), and A Taste of Honey (2023), and co-edited books British Women’s Cinema (2009), Ealing Revisited (2012) and Shane Meadows (2013). She has published in top journals in the field that include Screen, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, Feminist Media Studies, Open Screens, Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Journal of British Cinema and Television.

She was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project 'Transformation and Tradition in British Cinema of the 1960s', resulting in the co-authored book Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema (2019) and edited collection Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered (2020).

She has been a team member on two AHRC-funded Digital Humanities projects

• The Invisible Women – Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing
• Empowering Archivists: Applying New Tools and Approaches for Better Representation of Women in Audio-Visual Collections

She was one of the Principal Editors of the Journal of British Cinema and Television from 2015-2024 and is co-lead of the BAFTSS special interest group for British film and TV.

She is a frequent contributor to the media, to film-related events at venues including BFI Southbank, and to film-related documentaries for Bluray and DVD releases (short excerpt here).

She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Her specialism in British cinema began with her PhD at the University of Hull on representations of women in the 1950s, awarded in 2003. She worked at the University of Hull for several years and played a key role in setting up their Film Studies degree programmes before moving to UEA’s School of Film and Television Studies in 2009. Since then, she has held the position of School Director of Postgraduate Research from 2009 to 2012, Head of the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies 2014-2016, Athena Swan Gender Equality Lead 2016-2019, and from 2019-2023 was Research Director for UEA's Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities.

She holds a Senior HEA Fellowship.

Film and media history

British cinema (especially in terms of gender)

authorship and creative labour in cinema

film stardom

film aesthetics and mise-en-scene analysis

postwar British popular culture

• Senior Fellowship, Advance HE
• Have taught/convened: foundation year module ‘Introduction to Visual Cultures’, 1^st year core modules ‘Film History’, ‘Analysing Film and Television’, ‘Studies in Film History’, 'World Cinemas', and 2^nd and 3^rd year modules ‘British Cinema and the Past’, 'Film Theory',  ‘Film and Authorship’, 'Chick Flicks: Women and Cinema', ‘Gender and British Cinema’, ‘The Hollywood Studio System’, 'British Film since the 1960s' as well as undergraduate dissertations and MA module ‘Film Studies: History, Theory, Criticism’.
• Led on creation of joint degree History and Film.