Image: Tom Ford’s 2009 adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man.

Beyond Adaptation: Rethinking Print and Screen Cultures

Investigating the productive interplay between print and screen cultures
An exciting opportunity exists for a commencing PhD student to consider the mutual dependency of literary, cinematic and new digital mediatic regimes as they manifest in histories, theories and practices of remediation.

There is a need to reconceive the complex interactions of print and screen cultures across the last 100 years beyond page-to-screen models of adaptation. A more complex account of remediation would pay attention to questions of medium specificity, media ecology, narrative form and address, audience, notions of authorship and conjoined industrial histories and technologies of production. In the first instance, we invite HDR proposals on cross-media adaptation that address any of the following:

  • Feminist adaptation
  • Race and adaptation
  • Race film and/or Black writers in Hollywood
  • Gay writers in Hollywood
  • Hitchcock and adaptation
  • Sexuality and adaptation
  • Comix to live action adaptation
  • Film to television adaptation
  • Musicals and adaptation
  • Cinematic description in literature
  • Movie novelizations
  • Genre and adaptation
  • Adaptation and translation
  • Transnational adaptation

The journals Adaptation Studies and Film/Literature testify to the ongoing interest in the nexus of screen and print cultures, however they also reveal how much of this work remains anchored in a textual model of adaptation that presumes a movement from page to screen.

While theorists such as Robert Stam have addressed the shortcomings of “fidelity criticism,” the field continues to focus on established literary modes of authorship. Notable recent exceptions include Simone Murray’s The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (2012), Jack Boozer’s edited collection Authorship in Film Adaptation: Literature to Screenplay (2008) and Kyle Meikle’s Adaptations in the Franchise Era: 2001-16 (2019).

Based in Art History and Film Studies, English and Gender and Cultural Studies, the supervisory team shares common interest in questions of adaptation, gendered, sexual and raced identity, authorship and production, and medium specificity. Individually, we bring different disciplinary perspective to bear on cinema, including film theory, literary theory and queer theory.

Considered collectively, our published research covers the entire span of film history: silent-film, early and classical Hollywood, modernism, independent Hollywood, transnational cinema and the digital era. This includes numerous scholarly articles and nine monographs on U.S. and European cinema:

Associate Professor Sarah Gleeson-White: William Faulkner at Twentieth Century-Fox (OUP 2017); Literature in Motion: Film and the Formation of American Literary Culture 1890s-1920s (under contract OUP)

Associate Professor Bruce Isaacs: The Art of Pure Cinema (OUP 2020); The Orientation of Future Cinema (Bloomsbury 2013); Toward a New Film Aesthetic (Continuum 2008).

Dr Matilda Mroz: Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema: Posthumous Materiality and Unwanted Knowledge (Palgrave 2020); Temporality and Film Analysis (Edinburgh 2012)

Associate Professor Lee Wallace: Reattachment Theory: Queer Cinema of Remarriage (Duke 2020); Lesbianism, Cinema Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments (Routledge 2009).

This project represents an opportunity to work with established scholars at the cutting-edge of film studies. The supervisory team has supervised 11 HDRs to completion in the last 5 years and has significant experience in assisting early career researchers in the publication of books and articles.

We envisage developing an ARC Discovery Project on the theme of adaptation, which will include a co-edited anthology of original essays. Ideally, the PhD candidate will contribute to this publication and be involved in its preparation.

The successful candidate will also be included in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Cinema and Literature Network (initiated by Isaacs), which sponsors the biennial Camera-Stylo conference, most recently held at the University of Sydney in July 2021, and other one-off events such as the two-day symposium on film and literature held in the School of Literature, Arts and Media in 2019.

Applicants are invited to submit a proposal for PhD research that aligns directly to this project.

Prospective candidates may qualify for direct entry into the PhD program if their research proposal (see above) is accepted and they satisfy at least one of the criteria listed below.

  • Bachelor's degree with first- or second-class honours in an appropriate area of study that includes a research thesis based on primary data not literature review
  • Master's degree by research in an appropriate area of study that includes a research thesis that draws on primary data
  • Master's degree by coursework, with a research thesis or dissertation of 12,000–15,000 words that draws on primary data not literature review, with a grade-point average of at least 80 per cent in the degree.
  • Demonstrated appropriate professional experience and alternative qualifications in the field of study.

For more information regarding applying for a PhD refer to the course details for Doctor of Philosophy (Arts and Social Sciences).

Please also refer to guidelines for preparing a research proposal.

A number of scholarships are available to support your studies.

These scholarships will provide a stipend allowance of $35,629 per annum for up to 3.5 years. Successful international students will also receive a tuition fee scholarship for up to 3.5 years.

For other scholarship opportunities refer to Faculty Research Scholarships (Domestic) or Faculty Research Scholarships (International)

For details of the PhD projects mentioned above, email the lead researcher listed below:

Associate Professor Sarah R Gleeson-White

Associate Professor, Department of English

Associate Professor Lee Wallace

Associate Professor, Gender and Cultural Studies