Prof James Donald

Overview

http://www.arts.unsw.edu.au/faculty/staff-directory/james-donald-215.html

Research Summary

Stardom, 'race' and modernity: Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson. Universities and the media as modern institutions. Cinema and modernism. The future of the Humanities.

Publications

Authored Books
The Penguin Atlas of Media and Information (with Mark Balnaves and Stephanie Hemelryk Donald), New York: Penguin, 2001 (simultaneous editions in France, Germany and UK)
Imagining the Modern City, London: Athlone Press/Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999
Sentimental Education: Schooling, Popular Culture and the Regulation of Liberty, London: Verso, 1992

Edited Books
The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies (with Michael Renov), London/Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage Publications, 2008
Close Up, 1927-1933; Cinema and Modernism (with Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus), London: Cassell 1998/Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999
Cultural Remix: Theories of Politics and the Popular (with Erica Carter and Judith Squires), London Lawrence and Wishart, 1995
Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location (with Erica Carter and Judith Squires), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993
'Race', Culture and Difference (with Ali Rattansi), London: Sage, 1992
Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds, London: Macmillan, 1991
Fantasy and the Cinema, London: BFI Publishing, 1989
Formations of Fantasy (with Victor Burgin and Cora Kaplan), London: Methuen, 1986
Politics and Ideology (with Stuart Hall), Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986
Subjectivity and Social Relations (with Veronica Beechey), Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985
Formations of Nation and People, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984
Formations of Pleasure, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983
Is There Anyone Here From Education? (with AnnMarie Wolpe), London: Pluto, 1983

Recent Chapters in Books
‘Cinema, Modernism and Modernity: What Will It Do with Us?’, in A Handbook of Modernisms (ed. Peter Brooker et al.), Oxford University Press, 2010, forthcoming
‘Inner London: Literature, Media, Urbanism’, in The Cambridge Companion to London in Literature (ed. Lawrence Manley), Cambridge University Press, 2010, forthcoming
‘Sounds like Hell: Beyond Dystopian Noise’, in Urban Dystopias (ed. Gyan Prakash), Princeton University Press, 2009, in press
‘As it Happened…: Borderline, the uncanny and the cosmopolitan’, in Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties (ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis), Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
‘Wo bin ich? Was ist los? Was mache ich hier?’, 31-43 in Delete! Die Entschriftung des Öffentlichen Raums (ed. Rainer Dempf, Siegfried Mattl, Christoph Steinbrener), Orange Press, 2006
‘Flannery’, 155-166 in Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker), Routledge, 2005

Recent Articles & Review Articles
‘Jazz Modernism and Film Art: Dudley Murphy and Ballet mécanique’, Modernism/Modernity, vol. 16, no. 1, 2009
‘Internationalisation, Diversity and the Humanities Curriculum: Cosmopolitanism and Multiculturalism Revisited’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 41, no. 3, 2007
‘Kracauer and the Dancing Girls’, New Formations, no. 61, Spring 2007
‘What’s New?’, Continuum, vol. 18, no. 2, June 2004
'Kant, the press, and the public use of reason', Javnost: The Public, vol.10, no. 2, 2003

Affiliations and Memberships

Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
Board Member, UNSW Press
Board Member, Confucius Institute at UNSW
Editorial/advisory boards for Continuum, Extempore

Other Information

James Donald became Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in 2007, having been appointed Professor of Film Studies at UNSW in July 2003. He was previously Professor of Media at Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia, and before that, in England, he had worked in the School of Education at the Open University and helped to establish Media Studies at the University of Sussex. In the late 1970s, James Donald was editor of the journal Screen Education, and went on to found New Formations. He has written books about modern education and the modern city, and co-authored the Penguin Atlas of Media and Information. He has edited over a dozen books on cinema, the media, education, and cultural and social theory, as well as contributing to a variety of books and journals. His current research includes a project, supported by an ARC Discovery Grant, on the significance of two Black American stars, Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, in the transnational culture of modernism between the World Wars, and a comparative and historical account of universities and the media as modern institutions. Also, he is still trying to work out what sort of thing cinema is going to be in the twenty-first century.

Among the research topics he has supervised are the use of photography in charity campaigns, the life and work of the Soviet filmmaker Esfir Shub, performance and architecture, sex education in the 1960s, cinema and avant-garde art in the 1970s, British cinema in the 1980s, and media policy and media uses in Iran in the 1990s.

He is a graduate of Oxford University (BA Hons in English), Goldsmiths' College, London (MSc in Education) and the Open University (PhD in Sociology). In 2003, he was Visiting Fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2008, he was appointed a Special Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nottingham in the UK.

He serves on the boards of UNSW Press and the Confucius Institute at UNSW.