People

Guy Austin

Guy is Professor of French Studies and a specialist in Algerian cinema. He has worked on this topic since 2005 and has written the only book length study in English on modern Algerian film, Algerian National Cinema (MUP, 2012). He is especially interested in the themes of memory, identity and conflict as represented in Algerian film. His articles on these issues have appeared in journals such as Screen, The Journal of North African Cinemas, Modern and Contemporary France, and French Studies. His most recent publication on the topic is a chapter on Algerian documentary and the civil conflict of the 1990s, in the edited collection Scars and Wounds: Film and Legacies of Trauma (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). As well as research, Guy’s enthusiasm for Algerian cinema has resulted in him organizing a season of Algerian films at Newcastle’s Side Cinema, and teaching Algerian cinema to undergraduate and postgraduate students at Newcastle University.

Guy is also the founding director of the Research Centre in Film at Newcastle University, which he helped to set up in 2011 and led until 2016. During that time, he organised many film-related events for both academic and general audiences, including screenings, masterclasses, workshops and seminars. One of the conferences he organised at the Research Centre concerned the work of Pierre Bourdieu and how this can be applied to visual cultures, including Algerian cinema and also Bourdieu’s own photographs of Algeria. Guy has recently edited a collection of essays based on the conference, New Uses of Bourdieu in Film and Media Studies (Berghahn, 2016).