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Dr Graeme Gilloch

Reader

Degree: BA Durham Anthropology and Sociology 1983 MA York Sociology of Contemporary Culture 1986 PhD Cambridge Social and Political Science 1991

Associated research centres and groups: Material Culture and Consumption Group

Current Teaching

Recent ug teaching:

SOCL 101 Modern Lives Section

SOCL 200 Understanding Social Thought (core theory module)

SOCL 201 Methods: Visual Analysis

SOCL 209 Consumer Culture andSociety

My main areas of research and supervisory interest are:

Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School (especially, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer)

Contemporary social and cultural theory (especially continental theory)

Visual culture (especially film and photography)

Metrropolitan and urban culture and theory

Sociology and literature

Autobiography, biography, history and memory

Holocaust studies

Research Interests

I joined the Department in January 2006 after ten years at the University of Salford.

The principal focus of my academic work is the sociology of culture and cultural theory, and more specifically, the writings of particular scholars associated with the Frankfurt Institut fuer Sozialforschung (the Frankfurt School): the Critical Theorists Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and, more recently, Leo Lowenthal. For me, these writers, while offering no overarching or systematic theory of modernity and modern culture, nevertheless (or perhaps therefore) provide some of the most fascinating insights and tantalising (frustratingly nebulous) concepts and motifs for its illumination: aura, dialectical images, improvisation, the 'ornament'.

I have published extensively on Benjamin including two monographs, and have more recently published a number of pieces on Kracauer. I am presently writing what will be the first major analysis and assessment of Kracauer's work as a whole.

Four themes which particularly fascinate me and continue to inform my work:

1. The city, urban architecture, experience and representation from flanerie to film and especially the 'elective affinity' between the modern metropolis and cinema.
2. Commodities, objects and the spectacle of consumption: from Benjamin's arcades to Baudrillard's drug store for instance.
3. Memory (autobiography, societal biography, the tension between individual memory, collective memory and history), exile and melancholy and the role of the critical intellectual.
4. Propaganda and prejudice, anti-Semitism and the relationship between totalitarianism and spectacle.

I am especially interested in the ways in which the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School can be applied to the illumination of a wide range of contemporary texts and representations and have presented and/or published papers on the writings of Paul Auster, W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, the photographs of Sophie Calle, the art of Janet Cardiff, and films as diverse as Suzhou River and Toy Story 2!

I have undertaken archive research in Germany with the support of the Leverhulme Trust and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and have been a regular guest at the Nordic Summer University.

I am very happy to supervise doctoral students in any area of Critical Theory, or in cultural theory more generally or in regard to any of the above themes.

My publications include:

Single-Authored Books in Progress:

Siegfried Kracauer: An Intellectual Biography (Polity Press, Cambridge)

Single-Authored Books in Print:

Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002).

Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Polity Press, Cambridge 1996).(translated into Korean by the Hyohyung Publishing Company, Seoul 2005)

Journal Articles/Review Articles:

'Below the Surface: Antisemitism, Prejudice and Siegfried Kracauer's 'Test Film' Project' (co-authored with Dr Jaeho Kang, New School for Social Research NY, in New Formations special issue on Siegfried Kracauer, No. 61 summer 2007 pp. 149-160)

'Urban Optics: Film, Phantasmagoria and the City in Benjamin and Kracauer (in New Formations special issue on Siegfried Kracauer, No. 61, summer 2007 pp. 115-131)

(originally published in French translation in Simay ed 2005 see below)

'The Life and Times of Sheriff Woody: Benjamin, Baudrillard and some Theoretical Toys' (in InterCulture special issue 'Reproducing Art: Walter Benjamin's 'Work of Art' Essay Reconsidered', Vol 4, Issue 2, summer 2007) pp 1-18).

'Ornament and Kracauer' (review essay on Henrik Reeh's Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern Urban Culture in New Formations No. 58, summer 2006, pp. 147-151).

From Passage to Parly 2: Commodity Culture and Aesthetics in Benjamin and Baudrillard' (co-authored [50%] with Dr. Tim Dant, UEA, in New Formations special issue 'Reading Benjamin's Arcades', winter 2004/05, pp.139-53).

Pictures of the Past: Benjamin and Barthes on Photography and History' (European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, 1, 2002, pp. 5-23. (co-authored [50%] with Dr. Tim Dant, UEA).

'The Return of the Flaneur: The Afterlife of an Allegory' (New Formations special issue 'The Legacy of the Frankfurt School in Cultural Studies', summer 1999, pp. 101-9).

The Figure that Fascinates: Seductive Strangers in Benjamin and Baudrillard' (Journal of Renaissance and Modern Studies Vol. 40 special issue 'Reading the City', 1997, pp. 17-29. Republished in Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experience in the Modern Metropolis, Neil Leach ed., Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 43-56).

The Heroic Pedestrian or the Pedestrian Hero: Walter Benjamin and the Flaneur' (Telos no. 91, Spring 1992, pp. 108-116).

Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of History' (Telos no. 91, Spring 1992, pp.165-73).

'Three Biographical Studies of Walter Benjamin' (Telos no. 91, Spring 1992, pp. 173-8).

Book Chapters:

Optique urbaine: Le film, la Fantasmagorie et la ville chez Benjamin et Kracauer (invited contribution for Capitales de la modernite: Walter Benjamin etla ville, edited by Philippe Simay, editions de l'eclat,pp 101-127)

Trauma and Memory in the City: From Auster to Austerlitz' (joint paper [50%] with Dr Jane Kilby (Salford) in Urban Memory: History and Oblivion in the Modern City Mark Crinson ed. Routledge, London, 2005, pp. 1-22).

Fabricating Aura: the Face in Film' (in Actualities of Aura, Erik Steinskøg and Dag Pedersen eds., Nordic Summer University Press, Svanesund, Sweden, 2005 pp. 1-25).

'Orpheus in Hollywood: Siegfried Kracauer's Offenbach Film' (in Tracing Modernity, Mari Hvatttum and Christian Hermansen eds., Routledge, London, 2004, pp. 307-323).

Impromptus of a Great City: Siegfried Kracauer's Strassen in Berlin und anderswo' (in Tracing Modernity Mari Hvattum and Christian Hermansen eds., Routledge, London, 2004, pp. 291-306).

Postcards from Post-Cultures: Fatal Futures in Benjamin and Baudrillard' (in Ruinøs Modernitet, NSU Press, Copenhagen, 2000. Republished in Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experience in the Modern Metropolis, Neil Leach ed., Routledge, London, 2001 pp. 164-184).

Other Invited Book Contributions:

Invited contributor for the entries on Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Theory of Film for the volume Schlüsseltexte der Kritischen Theorie published by the Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt am Main: 2006.

Invited contributor for the entries on Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Hans Peter Müller, Barbara Marshall and Austin Harrinton eds, Routledge, London: 2005.

Walter Benjamin' (in Profiles in Contemporary Social Theory, Anthony Elliott and Bryan Turner eds., Sage, London, 2001).

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Potential Doctoral Proposals

My main areas of research and supervisory interest are:

Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School (especially, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer)

Contemporary social and cultural theory (especially continental theory)

Visual culture (especially film and photography)

Metrropolitan and urban culture and theory

Sociology and literature

Autobiography, biography, history and memory

Holocaust studies

Associated Keywords: Critical theory, Cultural Studies, Cultural theory, Culture, Culture and media, Film, Film studies, Film theory, German language, culture and society, Social theory, Sociology, Urban studies, Utopianism

View all research activities, news and events associated with Graeme Gilloch.

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