Dr Dennis Hanlon

Lecturer in Film Studies

Research profile

I am a specialist in Latin American, South Asian, and European (especially German) cinemas, and my research explores the transnational articulations among them.  For the period of the 1960s-1980s, my work is most concerned with politically-committed film movements; with contemporary cinema, I am most interested in the transnational circulation and mutation of genre films, especially those, like gangster films, that lend themselves to political readings. 

I am presently co-authoring a monograph on Indian director Manmohan Desai that explores authorship in popular Hindi cinema.  Other current projects include a book chapter revealing the influence of New Latin American Cinema on Bengali Third Cinema filmmaker Mrinal Sen and an article on the Chile films of the East German documentarians Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann.  Future projects include a reception study of Latin American revolutionary cinema in the two Cold War Germanys and a study of contemporary international gangster films that will use World-Systems Theory to map transnational flows of films and film styles.  Other areas of interest include Marxist aesthetics and film, ethnographic film, indigenous video, experimental film, and landscape and film. 

I received my PhD in Film Studies in 2009 from the University of Iowa, which honoured my dissertation, written under the direction of Prof. Kathleen Newman, with the Graduate Dean's Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2011.

I am currently co-director, with Dr Joshua Yumibe, of the department's post-graduate research program.

See also the PURE research profile.

Research students

I would welcome inquiries from potential students with projects exploring politics and cinema (especially Third Cinema and/or cinema and Cold War politics), Latin American cinema (from a national or transnational perspective), Hindi popular cinema or Indian parallel or art cinema, DEFA, contemporary East Asian genre films (preferably from a transnational perspective), non-Western subjectivity in cinema, World-Systems Theory, and theories of space in late-capitalism.

Selected publications

I have just published a translation / illustrated film analysis in JumpCut. Available here.