Will Brooker

Will Brooker studied BA (Hons) Film and English at the University of East Anglia, then a postgraduate diploma in Communications, with a specialism in 16mm film making, at Goldsmiths College. While teaching part-time at FE colleges, he studied part-time on the Film and Television MA at Westminster, and then in 1996 gained a scholarship for PhD study at Cardiff University.

Brooker's doctoral thesis, a cultural history of Batman from 1939-1999, was published as the monograph Batman Unmasked, and attracted significant media attention. He was employed at Richmond, The American International University in London, from 1999-2005, as an Associate Professor of Communication, and during that time published widely, including the monographs Using the Force and Alice's Adventures, and the edited collections The Audience Studies Reader and The Blade Runner Experience. Brooker was appointed at Kingston in 2005 as Field Leader in Film. He subsequently took the broader role of Field Leader (later Director of Studies) of Film and Television, and was promoted to PL. In 2009 he was promoted to Reader and became the Director of Research for Film and Television, also publishing a BFI Film Classics volume on Star Wars that year.

Brooker's monograph Hunting the Dark Knight was published in 2012. He was appointed as the first British editor of Cinema Journal in early 2013 and was promoted to Professor in May of that year. His latest research constituted a year-long David Bowie "immersion", covering 40 years of music legend David Bowie's career by spending a few months at a time experiencing specific moments in the star's life.