Professor Richard Dyer

Research profile

My first degree was in French (with English, German and Philosophy) from St. Andrews and my PhD from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. I taught for many years at the University of Warwick and am now also teaching at King's College London.

My work focuses on issues of representation and entertainment and especially the relations between them: how the form that a representation takes has much to do with its entertainment value, how entertainment works through representations. I have focused especially on the very notion of entertainment, tyring to unpack this common sense construct, and on represenatations of gender, 'race' and sexuality. More recently I have focused on Italian cinema and on music and film (including most recently the work of Nino Rota and the use of songs in, mainly, American movies). I am now embarking on a study of the serial killer in European cinema and on La dolce vita.

Research students

I am interested in supervising students working on European cinema (especially its popular forms), music and film and all kinds of representation.  I am also interested in projects investigating the connections between form and values, pleasure and ideology, culture and aesthetics.

Selected publications

SCHOLARLY BOOKS PUBLISHED:

Stars, London: British Film Institute, 1979; new edition 1998 (with new section by Paul MacDonald)

Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, London: Macmillan, 1987; second edition, London: Routledge 2004.

Now You See It: Historical Studies in Lesbian and Gay Film, London/New York: Routledge, 1990; revised and expanded edition 2003.

Only Entertainment, London: Routledge, 1992; revised and expanded edition 2002.

The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations, London: Routledge, 1993; revised and expanded edition 2002.

Brief Encounter, London: British Film Institute, 1993.

White, London: Routledge, 1997.

Seven, London: British Film Institute, 1999.

The Culture of Queers, London: Routledge, 2002.

Pastiche, London: Routledge, 2006.

Nino Rota, Music, Film and Feeling, London: Palgrave / British Film Institute, 2010.

In the Space of a Song, London: Routledge, forthcoming (2011).

Lethal Repetition: The Serial Killer in European Cinema, London: Palgrave / British Film Institute, forthcoming (2012)

La dolce vita, London: Palgrave / British Film Institute, forthcoming (2012)

 

RECENT CHAPTERS:

'Music, People and Reality: the Case of Italian Neo-realism' in Mera, Miguel and Burnand, David (eds) European Film Music, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.

'Music Alongside: The Work of Nino Rota' in D. Goldmark, L. Kramer & R. Leppert (eds) Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

'Federico Fellini et l'art du casting' in V. Amiel, J. Nacache, G. Sellier and C Viviani (eds) L'Acteur au cinema, Rennes: Presses Univisertaires de Rennes, 2007.

'Italian Cinema' in P. Cook (ed.) The Cinema Book, London: British Film Institute, 2007.

'The Idea of a Gay Icon' in National Portrait Gallery Gay Icons, London: National Portrait Gallery, 2009.

'8½' in T. Brown and J. Walters (eds) Moments in Film, London: British Film Institute, 2011.