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 Ken Russell's engagement with Frankenstein; videogame adaptations related to H.P. Lovecraft; interiority and London cinema in films by expatriate directors; an exploration on paternalism and bohemian in London youth cinema focused on The Party's Over (1965); and an analysis of the "magic" of uncanny spaces in The Wicker Man (1973). Additionally, he has 10 entries in the forthcoming London's East End: A Short Encyclopedia (ed. Kevin A. Morrison).
He teaches courses in composition, rhetoric, and film.
He is currently writing a book of biographical sketches of outside, eccentric, and polymath figures in Post-War British cultural life. He is also writing a book on uncanny spaces and landscapes in post-war British cinema and television.
He has recently written or is writing work on competing visions of the "retreat to medievalism" in contemporary film and television; an exploration of generational conflict in films about the Malayan Emergency; an analysis of the "magic" of uncanny spaces in The Wicker Man (1973); and a study of the "incoherent" visual style of Russell Mulcahy and his Highlander films.
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
"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
"Screening War for Children in Post-Suez Britain," Virtual Talk and Book Release Event, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, 7/3/20
“Nuancing the People’s War: Home Fires (2015-2016) and Expanded World War II Narratives,” Popular Culture Association Conference, Washington, D.C., 4/18/19