Expertise & Events

I am an experienced public speaker and enjoy communicating my research with a wide variety of audiences.

I regularly present my work at science festivals, film festivals, conventions, and conferences.

I am available for interviews on the following areas, please either contact me directly or via my university press officer Dominic Smith:

SCIENCE AND ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA with a focus on how science is communicated via fictional screen media e.g. AI futures as imagined in science-based media; ethics of robotic care; medical technologies on screen; medicalised horror; scientists on screen; scientists behind the scenes.

WOMEN IN SCIENCE ON SCREEN both in terms of the representation of women scientists (e.g. mathematician Katherine Johnson/Hidden Figures) and fictional women in the science (e.g. biologist Cosima Niehaus, Orphan Black; forensic pathologist Dana Scully, The X Files). I am interested in how women are represented as anomalies or exceptions rather than part of a diverse professional workforce.

SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA as a genre cinema that has historically attempted to imagine scientifically viable future (past and present) storyworlds. I am an expert on the 1968 Planet of the Apes movie and the resultant franchise as a record of US cultural discourse. My research into science fiction is focussed between the years of 1968 (the beginnging of the rating system/post-classical Hollywood) and 1977 (the release of Star Wars and Close Encounters).

SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN SCIENCE/FICTION FILM (POST-1968) with particular expertise in the US Catholic Church’s approach to the film industry following the end of censorship (that was closely tied to the church and its attitudes to science and society). I have expertise in The Exorcist and A Clockwork Orange as controversial films that were publicly derided yet recognised within the organisation as positive religious representations.