Kevin M. Flanagan

Kevin M. Flanagan

Kevin M. Flanagan

Assistant Professor

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.

His recently completed book chapters include studies of "consumptive horror" under Reagan and Thatcher; London films about interiority and inner space made by non-English or expatriate directors; and Ken Russell's engagement with Frankenstein. 

He teaches courses in composition, rhetoric, and film.

 

Current Research

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. Additionally, Flanagan is preparing book chapters on The Party's Over (1966) and X-Certificate films about youth prior to 1966 and on video game adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft across genres. In 2020, he wrote several encyclopedia entries on books, films, and architecture of London's East End.

Selected Publications

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).

Expanded Publication List

Journal Special Issues, as editor

  • “Architecture & Space in British Documentary Television” dossier Screen 59.1 (March 2018): 99-131. Co-edited with Matthew Harle.
  • Wide Screen Journal (www.widescreenjournal.org) vol. 6 no. 1. Issue on “Videogame Adaptation.” September 2016.

 

Essays in Peer Reviewed/Refereed Journals:

  • “The hosted architectural documentary on British television: Ian Nairn and the personalization of place,” Screen 59.1 (Spring 2018): 114-121.
  • (with Matthew Harle) “Architectural documentaries on British television: introduction,” Screen 59.1 (Spring 2018): 99-104
  • “Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy (1976),” Porn Studies 4.3 (2017): 311-318.
  • “Introduction - Videogame Adaptation: Some Experiments in Method,” Wide Screen 6.1 (Sept 2016). 18pp. http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/101/129.
  • “Wheatley’s Progress: High-Rise (2015) and the Burden of Ballard,” Adaptation 9.3 (2016): 1-5.
  • “‘Green and Pleasant Land?’: Ben Wheatley’s British Cinema Between Romanticism and Modernism,” Critical Quarterly 58.1 (2016): 16-22. Ben Wheatley, J.G. Ballard, and High-Rise Special Issue. Edited by Adam Lowenstein and Roger Luckhurst.
  • “Displacements and Diversions: Oh! What a Lovely War and the Adaptation of Trauma,” South Atlantic Review 80.3-4 (2016): 96-117. Double Issue on Adaptation Studies. 
  • “Ken Russell’s Wartime Imagery.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 12.4 (2015): 539-555. Ken Russell Special Issue. Edited by Christophe van Eecke, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, and John Hill.
  • “The Road to Excess Leads to The Magic Christian: Comedy, the Grotesque, and the Limits of the Body.” Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 29.1 (Fall 2013), 29-37. Humor and Culture Issue.
  • “Whitehead's London: Pop and the Ascendant Celebrity.” In Framework 52.1 (Spring 2011), 278-298. Things Fall Apart: Peter Whitehead Issue, Part I. 

 

Books - Monographs:

  • War Representation in British Cinema and Television: From Suez to Thatcher, and Beyond  (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Britain and the World Book Series.

 

Books - Edited Volumes:

  • Editor of Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press: Released August 2009). An edited collection of scholarly essays on director Ken Russell. My pieces include the Introduction, “Television, Contested Culture, and Social Control: Cultural Studies and Pop Goes the Easel,” and “Complicating the Costume Drama: Lady Chatterley, Ken Russell, and the Conceits of Heritage.” 

 

Books - Forthcoming:

  • (as editor) Edgar Wright: Interviews (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019). Under contract. On Hold.
  • I am engaged in research for a book of biographical essays around figures in UK cultural life from the 1940s-1970s.

 

Essays in Edited Collections:

  • “From Crowds to Swarms: Movement and Bodies in Neo-Peplum Films.” In Nicholas Diak, ed., The New Peplum: Essays on Sword and Sandal Films and Television Programs Since the 1990s (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Pub, 2017), 63-77.
  • “Playing with the Past: The Complete and Utter History of Britain in the Context of Sixties Television.” In Lynn Whitfield, Paul N. Reinsch, and Robert G. Weiner, eds, Python Beyond Python: Critical Essays on the Monty Python Members Before and After their Participation in the Group. Palgrave Studies in Comedy (London: Palgrave, 2017), 153-170. 
  • “Videogame Adaptation.” In Thomas Leitch, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (New York: Oxford UP, 2017), 441-454.
  • “Machine-Age Comedy Gone Rural: Hustlin' Hank (1923) and the Problem of Animals on Film”. In Sebastian Manley and Kirsten Irving, eds. Lives Beyond Us: Poems and Essays on the Film Reality of Animals (London: Sidekick Books, 2015), 251-263.
  • “Introduction,” In Kevin Jackson, Carnal...to the Point of Scandal (London: Pallas Athene, 2014), 11-19.
  • “Humphrey Jennings at the Fair: Spare Time, Family Portrait and the Rhetoric of National Identity.” In Celia Pearce et. al. eds. Meet Me at the Fair: A World's Fair Reader (Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press, 2014), 363-370.
  • “Porn Goes to College: American Universities, Their Students, and Pornography 1969-1973,” Kevin M. Flanagan and Arthur Knight. In Eric Schaefer, ed. Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014), 407-434. 
  • “The Grotesque State of the Nation: Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988) and the Lessons of Cultural Studies,” In Bryan Cardinale-Powell and Marc DiPaolo, eds. Devised and Directed by Mike Leigh (London: Bloomsbury Academic/Continuum, 2013), 303-326.
  • “Teaching Intertextuality and Parody through the Graphic 'Supertext': Martin Rowson's The Waste Land (1990)” In Carrye Kay Syma and Robert G. Weiner, eds. Graphic Novels and Comics in the Classroom: Essays on the Educational Power of Sequential Art (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 73-83.
  • “Rethinking Fellini’s Poe: Nonplaces, Media Industries and the Manic Celebrity” In Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm, eds., Adapting Poe: Re-Imaginings in International and Popular Culture (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2012), 59-71
  • “'Civilization...ancient and wicked': The Ideological Field of 1980s Sword and Sandal Films.” In Michael G. Cornelius, ed. Of Muscles and Men: Essays on the Sword & Sandal Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 87-103.

 

Forthcoming Essays in Edited Collections/Books: 

  • “Adapting Monstrous Creation: Lisztomania (1975) and Gothic (1986) as Gothic Mash-Ups,” Gothic Mash-Ups, ed. Natalie Neill (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021). Proposed.
  • "Taste, Paternalism, and London Bohemianism: The Party's Over (1965) through Censorship and Cultural History," Adult Themes: British Cinema and the “X” Rating, 1958-1972, eds. Benjamin Halligan and Christopher Weedman (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). Proposed.
  • “Dropping Out: Interiority, Claustrophobia, and Decadence in Cosmopolitan London Cinema of the 60s and 70s,” Global London on Screen: Sojourners, Cosmopolitans and Foreigners’ Cinematic Visions of a Multicultural City, eds. Keith B. Wagner and Roland-Francois Lack (London: University of London Press, 2021?). Submitted.
  • “Rituals of Consumption: An Anatomy of Capitalist Horror under Reagan and Thatcher,” Oh, the Horror: Politics and Culture in Horror Films of the 1980s, eds. Kevin M. Scott and Connor M. Scott (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Pub, 2020). Submitted.

 

Selected Reference Book Contributions:

  • Forthcoming: “Treasure Island,” and Robert Louis Stevenson in Books to Film, Vol. 3, general ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Gale/Cengage, 2019)?
  • Forthcoming: Lewis Carroll, “Alice in Wonderland,” and “From Russia with Love” in Books to Film, Vol. 2, general ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Gale/Cengage, 2019)?
  • “Ken Russell,” “Women in Love,” and “The Devils” in Books to Film, Vol. 1, general ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit, MI: Gale/Cengage, 2017): 77-82; 399-404.
  • 23 Entries - [Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (book); Alice in Wonderland videogames; Batman videogames; Batman Returns videogames; Beetlejuice; Beetlejuice videogames; Bekmambetov, Timur; Cabin Boy; Carroll, Lewis; Gough, Michael; Irving, Washington; Jones, Jeffrey; Keaton, Michael; “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; Nightmare Before Christmas videogames; Planet of the Apes videogames; Singles; Sleepy Hollow; Smith, Kevin; Suschitsky, Peter; Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory videogames] for The Tim Burton Encyclopedia, ed. Samuel J. Umland (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2015).
  • 8 Entries - [The Acid House; The Anatomist; Burke and Hare (1972); Burke and Hare (2010); The Doctor and the Devils; The Flesh and the Fiends; The Greed of William Hart; Night Mail] for Directory of World Cinema: Scotland, ed. Bob Nowlan and Zachary Finch (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2015).
  • “Filmography” for American Countercultures: An Encyclopedia of Nonconformists, Alternative Lifestyles, and Radical Ideas in U.S. History, ed. Gina Misiroglu (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Publishers, 2008). ~7,500 words/nearly 300 listings.

 

DVD/Blu-Ray Liner Notes:

  • “The Debussy Film” in The Ken Russell Collection: The Great Composers. BFI Publishing, 2016.
  • Introduction to The Ken Russell Collection: The Great Composers. BFI Publishing, 2016.

 

Selected Book Reviews in Journals:

  • Forthcoming: Review of The Style of Sleaze: The American Exploitation Film, 1959-1977. Journal of Popular Film and Television.
  • Forthcoming: Review of The Composer on Screen: Essays on Classical Music Biopics, ed. Paul Fryer. Journal of Popular Film and Television.
  • Forthcoming: Review of Cold War Film Genres, ed. Homer B. Pettey. Journal of Popular Film and Television.
  • Forthcoming: Review of Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System. Journal of Popular Film and Television.
  • Review of Simon Willmetts, In Secrecy’s Shadow: The OSS and CIA in Hollywood Cinema, 1941-1979. Journal of Popular Film and Television 46.2 (2018): 118-119.
  • Forthcoming: Review of J.E. Smyth, Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance. Journal of Popular Film and Television. 
  • Review of World Film Locations: Liverpool, eds. Jez Connolly and Caroline Whelan. Film & History 48.1 (Summer 2018): 76-77.
  • Review of Je T’aim...Moi Non Plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations, eds. Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley. Britain and the World 11.1 (Spring 2018): 139-140.
  • Review of Daniel Kremer, Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films. Journal of Popular Film and Television 45:4 (2017): 235.
  • Review of Historical Dictionary of British Cinema, eds. Alan Burton and Steve Chibnall. Film & History. Winter 2017, 68-70.
  • Review of Greg M. Colon Semenza and Bob Hasenfratz, The History of British Literature on Film, 1895-2015. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 11 (Summer 2016).
  • Review of Pevsner: The Complete Broadcast Talks: Architecture and Art on Radio and Television, 1945-1975, ed. Stephen Games. Modern Language Studies (Winter 2016), 73-75.
  • Review of George A. Romero: Interviews, ed. Tony Williams. Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 14 (2014): 96-99.
  • Review of Peter Weir: Interviews, ed. John C. Tibbetts. Studies in Australasian Cinema 8.1 (2014): 76-78.
  • Comparative review of Nazisploitation!: The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture, eds. Daniel H. Magilow et. al. & David Huckvale's Visconti and the German Dream: Romanticism, Wagner and the Nazi Catastrophe in Film. Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 6.3 (2013): 427-429.
  • Review of David Melbye's Landscape Allegory in Cinema: From Wilderness to Wasteland. Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film & Television 43.2 (2013): 92-93.
  • Review of Simon Rycroft's Swinging City: A Cultural Geography of London, 1950-1974. Literary London 10.2 (2013). http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/autumn2013/flanagan.html
  • Review of William Hawes' Caligula and the Fight for Artistic Freedom: The Making, Marketing, and Impact of the Bob Guccione Film. Journal of American Studies of Turkey. 34-35 (2012): 136-138. Special issue on Gore Vidal. 
  • Review of Danny Boyle: Interviews, ed. Brent Dunham. Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film & Television 42.2 (2012): 86-88.
  • Review of Stephen R. Bissette's Teen Angels & New Mutants: Rick Veitch's Brat Pack and the Art, Karma, and Commerce of Killing Sidekicks. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 3.2 (2012): 238-240. 
  • Review of Jonathan Conlin's Civilisation (TV Classics). Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film & Television 42.1 (2012): 19-21.
  • Review of Todd Berliner's Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema. Film Criticism Vol. XXXVI, No. 2 (Winter, 2011/2012): 74-77.
  • Review of Iain Sinclair's Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report. Modern Language Studies 40.2 (2011): 102-104.
  • Review of British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade, eds. Laurel Forster and Sue Harper (2010). Screening the Past 30 (2011). http://screeningthepast.com/?p=347
  • Review of Don't Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Paul Newland. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Vol. 31 No.1 (March 2011): 85-87.
  • Review of Seventies British Cinema, ed. Robert Shail. Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film & Television. Vol. 40, No. 1 (April/May 2010): 102-104 .
  • Comparative review of Tony Shaw’s Hollywood’s Cold War and James Chapman’s War and Film. Scope: An Online Journal of Film & TV Studies. Issue 16, February 2010. http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/bookreview.php?issue=16&id=1183

 

Books Reviewed for Choice

  • Forthcoming: Review of Tom Rice’s Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire in Choice 57.?
  • Forthcoming: Review of Matt Glasby’s Britpop Cinema: From Trainspotting to This is England in Choice 57.4 (Dec 2019)
  • Forthcoming: Review of Richard Farmer et. al’s Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema in Choice 57.3 (Nov 2019)
  • Review of Barbara Caroline Mennel’s Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema in Choice 56.12 (Aug 2019)
  • Review of Cael M. Keegan’s Lana and Lilly Wachowski in Choice 56.10 (June 2019)
  • Review of Eleftheria Thanouli’s History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines in Choice 56.9 (May 2019)
  • Review of Spencer Golub’s The Baroque Night (2018) in Choice 56.8 (Apr 2019)
  • Review of The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, eds. Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckhart Voights (2018) in Choice 56.6 (Feb 2019)
  • Review of Rick Warner’s Godard and the Essay Film: A Form that Thinks (2018) in Choice 56.5 (Jan 2019)
  • Review of Matthew B. Hill’s Unconventional Warriors: The Fantasy of the American Resistance Fighter in Television and Film (2018) in Choice 56.4 (Dec 2018)
  • Review of Nathan Abram’s Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (2018) in Choice 56.2 (Oct 2018)
  • Review of Matthew Jones’s Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain: Recontextualizing Cultural Anxiety (2018) in Choice 55.12 (Aug 2018)
  • Review of Jennifer Frost’s Producer of Controversy: Stanley Kramer, Hollywood Liberalism, and the Cold War (2018) in Choice 55.11 (July 2018)
  • Review of Whitney Crother Dilley’s The Cinema of Wes Anderson: Bringing Nostalgia to Life (2017) in Choice 55.7 (Mar 2018)
  • Review of John A. Duvall’s The Environmental Documentary (2017) in Choice 55.4 (Dec 2017)
  • Review of Susan Courtney’s Split Screen Nation (2017) in Choice 55.2 (Oct 2017)
  • Review of Marsha Gordon’s Film is Like a Battleground (2017) in Choice 54.12 (Aug 2017)

 

Selected Film/DVD/Radio Reviews:

  • Forthcoming: Review of Scent of Rain & Lightning (2018). Kansas History (2019)
  • Forthcoming: Review of Overlord (2018). Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2019)
  • Review of American Interior (2014). Kansas History 40.1 (Spring 2017).
  • Review of The War Game Files. Response Journal 1 (2017). <responsejournal.net>. https://responsejournal.net/issue/2017-06/feature/review-war-game-files
  • Review of The Sublime and Beautiful (2014). Kansas History 38.2 (Summer 2015).
  • Review of Top Boy Season 1 (2011). Literary London 11.1 (2014): 77-79.
  • Review of L.A. is My Hometown (1976). Film & History 43.1 (2013): 83-85.
  • Review of Razorback (1984). Studies in Australasian Cinema 5.1 (2011): 95-96.
  • Review of Ghost Story (1974). Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies no. 8 (2010): http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/FilmReview8.html#anchor_79.
  • Review of The London Nobody Knows (1967). Film & History 40.1 (2010): 129-130.
  • Review of The Assassination Bureau (1969). Scarlet Street #53 (2005).

 

Conference Reports

  • Location London, 7-8 March 2014. Literary London 11.1 (2014), 59-61. http://literarylondon.org/london-journal/spring2014/flanagan1.pdf
  • Imagining the Past: Ken Russell , Biography, and the Art of Making History. Alphaville 7 (2014).  http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue7/HTML/CReportFlanagan.html

 

Invited Blog Posts

  • “Discussing The Devils with Kevin Flanagan.” Film Struck Blog (October 2018): http://filmstruck.tumblr.com/post/178713258514/discussing-the-devils-71-with-kevin-flanagan-by
  • “Adapting and Translating Chrono Trigger Across Time.” Birmingham City University Cultural Translation Research Blog (May 2018). http://bcmcr.org/culturaltranslation/2018/05/30/guest-post-kevin-m-flanagan-on-translating-chrono-trigger/
  • “Nuancing Ken Russell.” Edinburgh University Press Blog (13 Oct 2015): https://euppublishingblog.com/2015/10/13/nuancing-ken-russell/
  • “A Lurid Legacy: Lessons from Sweeney Todd and Hangover Square.” Pitt Play (2011): http://www.play.pitt.edu/blog/lurid-legacy-lessons-sweeney-todd-and-hangover-square

 

Education

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

Recent Presentations

"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

“Dunkirk (2017) and the Historiography of British War Films,” Britain and the World 2019 Conference, Kansas City, 4/13/19

“Problems in Marketing Transnational Film Productions: Localization and Global Audiences,” William & Mary Global Film Festival, 02/17/18

“Remixing World War II: Goodtimes Enterprises, Experimental Documentary and the British Film Industry in the 1970s,” Britain and the World 2017 Conference, Austin, TX, 4/7/17