Barry Langford

I hold degrees from Queens’ College, Cambridge, and Columbia University. My research interests include critical theory; representations of the Holocaust in film and television; theories of mass culture; urban studies; postmodernism; post-classical Hollywood; film genre, especially the Western, science fiction film, war films.

My major publications are Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology since 1945 (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). The essay collection Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (co-edited with Robert Eaglestone) was published in December 2007.

Recent and forthcoming shorter include essays on Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and the Holocaust; "revisionist" Westerns; suburban sexualities; narrative reversal as redemption in Holocaust film; Chris Marker’s politics; urban apocalypse and the theory of Michel de Certeau; time and narrative in The Lord of the Rings; national identity in George Lucas’ American Graffiti; the political unconscious of TV sitcoms; contemporary Holocaust film; and the theorisation of screenwriting.

I am currently preparing Darkness Visible, a study of Holocaust film.

I am also a practicing professional screenwriter. My original short screenplay Torte Bluma was filmed in New York in summer 2004, with a cast: including Stellan Skarsgaard and Simon McBurney, and premiered at the 2005 Edinburgh Film Festival. Torte Bluma was judged Best Drama at the 2005 Los Angeles International Short Film Festival and Best Film at the 2005 Palm Springs International Shorts Festival. Torte Bluma can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKaEEie66ZI. I am the co-creator and co-author of the 6-part ITV drama series The Frankenstein Chronicles (airing Autumn 2015).