Composition: British film and television, adaptation studies, composition, British cultural studies, film and television directors, media history, arts documentary
Kevin M. Flanagan received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015 in English/film studies (dissertation - The British War Film, 1939-1980: Culture, History, and, Genre). A book based on this project, called War Representation in British Cinema and Television: From Suez to Thatcher, and Beyond, was published in October 2019 by Palgrave.
In June 2016, he was a Guest Curator at the British Film Institute, where he co-programmed (with Matthew Harle) the "Architecture on TV" season. Flanagan and Harle's dossier on architectural programming on British television was published in Screen in 2018.
Flanagan contributed essays and an audio commentary to the critically acclaimed BFI blu-ray/DVD boxed set Ken Russell: The Great Composers (2016). Flanagan is editor of Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England's Last Mannerist (2009, Scarecrow Press) and has contributed essays to the Journal of British Cinema and Television, Framework, Critical Quarterly, South Atlantic Review, Adaptation, and many others. He contributed the "Videogame Adaptation" chapter to the Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (2017, ed. Thomas Leitch) and has edited a special issue of Widescreen Journal on the same subject. He regularly reviews books for Choice, Film & History, and the Journal of Popular Cinema and Television.
He has forthcoming essays in anthologies or edited books on interiority and London cinema in films by expatriate directors; an exploration on bohemianism and the X certificate in London youth cinema focused on The Party's Over (1965); an analysis of the "magic" of uncanny spaces in The Wicker Man (1973); a study of Peter Watkins' early films in the context of amateur movies about war; and an analysis of Lindsay Anderson's The White Bus (1967) through the lens of townscape criticism.
He teaches courses in composition, cultural history, and film studies.
Flanagan is slowly writing a book on uncanny spaces and landscapes in post-war British cinema and television.
He is currently writing or has recently written a meditation on how curatorship and marketing in the boutique blu-ray space promotes new forms of seriality and franchise consumption; on Peter Watkins' amateur war films; on Lindsay Anderson's The White Bus and its relationship to townscape criticism; on the reception and legacy of The Who's performance of Tommy at Woodstock; and on films about the experience of young British soldiers during the Malayan Emergency.
Flanagan, Kevin M. "Head Games: Adapting Lovecraft Beyond Survival Horror," The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Video Game, Television, eds. Max Dos Passos and Tim Lanzendorfer (London: Palgrave, 2023), 263-277.
Flanagan, Kevin M. "Adapting Monstrous Creation: Lisztomania and Gothic as Gothic Mash-ups," Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation and Intertextuality in Gothic Storytelling, ed. Natalie Neill (London: Lexington Books, 2022), 63-77.
Flanagan, Kevin M., War Representation in British Cinema and Television: From Suez to Thatcher, and Beyond (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Britain and the World Book Series.
Flanagan, Kevin M. “The hosted architectural documentary on British television: Ian Nairn and the personalization of place,” Screen 59.1 (Spring 2018): 114-121
Flanagan, Kevin M. “Videogame Adaptation.” In Thomas Leitch, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (New York: Oxford UP, 2017), 441-454
Flanagan, Kevin M., ed. Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press: 2009).
2021 Summer Funding from the Center for Humanities Research, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, George Mason University - https://chr.gmu.edu/research/
ENGH101 - Composition
ENGH302 - Advanced Composition
ENGH202 - Texts and Contexts - Novels and Films about Hollywood and Filmmaking
ENGH372 - Introduction to Film
HNRS240 - Reading the Past - The Cold War: Cultures & Legacies
B.A. - Literary and Cultural Studies, College of William and Mary '06
M.A. - English/Film Studies, North Carolina State University, '09
PH.D. - English/Film Studies, University of Pittsburgh, '15
“Exorcizing the Myths: Contextualizing the Amateur War Films of Peter Watkins,” Britain and the World 2023, 4/23/23
“Whose Law is it Anyway?: Detection, Magic, and the Uncanny Spaces of The Wicker Man,”; Chair of Panel on British Period Drama. PCA/ACA Virtual Conference, 4/13-16/22
"Youth and the Malayan Emergency: Generational Tensions and Ideological Dissonances in British War Films Made After the Conflict," Workshop on the Malayan Emergency in Film and Literature, Monash University Malaysia, 11/5/21
"The Past as the Future: Remade Societies and the Retreat to Medievalism in Recent Films," 34th Annual Medieval-Renaissance Conference, UVA-Wise, 9/18/21
"Free Cinema?: Lorenza Mazzetti and Outsiderness in 1950s Britain," PCA/ACA, 6/2/21