Lesley Speed

Lesley is a Senior Lecturer and researcher in media and screen studies. She has taught units in digital literacy, media studies, screen studies, adaptation studies, communication and cultural studies, and interdisciplinary Honours courses, as well as supervising research students from Honours to PhD level. Before teaching at Federation University and the University of Ballarat, she taught at La Trobe University, the University of Melbourne and three campuses of Monash University.

This wide range of experience is reflected in Lesley’s research, which is published in Australia and internationally and cited in many countries and various languages. Her research is required reading in tertiary courses internationally. Her publications include the books Clueless: American Youth in the 1990s and Australian Comedy Films of the 1930s: Modernity, the Urban and the International. Lesley has been a Scholar in Residence at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, a peer reviewer for many journals and publishers in and outside Australia, and a judge in the ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) Awards.

Lesley’s work includes an emphasis on popular screen texts, extending to digital media, independent screen media, comedy, popular genres and genre-mixing. Her research often centres on social aspects of screen texts, including their relationships to socio-historical contexts, public discourse and shifting ideas about youth, adulthood and everyday life. Her major research projects have focused on comedy and youth culture. However, the ideas underpinning her research are often as much about relationships between screen texts and society as they are about specific platforms, formats or genres. Lesley has pursued research interests in screen comedy; cultural value in relation to popular culture; and social and spatial aspects of screen texts. These interests can be found, individually or in intersecting ways, in her research publications about topics from teen films to early cinema, screen comedy to video games.