Alumni publications

In 2025, Dr Cassice Last and Dr Patrick Adamson published their PhD work with top academic publishers.

Dr Last's book The Contemporary American Survival Film was published with Bloomsbury in May. In it, she investigates and breaks down the contemporary American Survival Film (from Cast Away onwards), focusing on film, television, literature and video games. She graduated in 2020 with a thesis titled 'Human versus Where?: Navigating the Survival Space in the 21st Century American Survival Film'.

Dr Adamson's book Projecting America: The Epic Western and National Mythmaking in 1920s Hollywood was published with University of Oklahoma Press in October. In the first-ever book on the wave of silent epic Westerns of the 1920s, he demonstrates how these films indelibly impacted the genre, historical filmmaking, and Hollywood, inviting audiences to accept uncritical visions of Manifest Destiny as accurate history. He graduated in 2020 with a thesis titled '"Americanism in Action": the 1920s Epic Western and Hollywood Historical Cinema'.

Dr Last is a Halls Life Coordinator and Warden, and Dr Adamson is an Associate Lecturer in Film Studies, both at the University of St Andrews.