Professor Kevin Donnelly BA(hons), PGCE(FE), MA, PhD
Professor of Film and Film Music
Professor Kevin Donnelly is Professor of Film and Film Music at the University of Southampton.
I am primarily a theorist and historian of film music and film sound, but with a strong interdisciplinary interest in aesthetics and theory, and an interdisciplinary interest in culture beyond film.
I attended the University of East Anglia and the University of Cardiff, where I was taught by film theorist Thomas Elsaesser, film historians Charles Barr and Andrew Higson, novelist W.G. Sebald, composer Denis Smalley and parapsychologist David Fontana. As a research student I was teaching assistant to Laura Mulvey and Pam Cook. I have taught at the University of Wales, Aberystwtyth, Staffordshire University and the University of East Anglia before I came to the University of Southampton as Reader in Film Studies in 2007.
I am author of The Shining (2018) Magical Musical Tour: Rock and Pop in Film Soundtracks (2015), Occult Aesthetics: Sound and Image Synchronization (2013), British Film Music and Film Musicals (2007), The Spectre of Sound (2005) and Pop Music in British Cinema (2001); and editor of Film Music: Critical Approaches (2001), co-editor (with Phil Hayward) of Music in Science Fiction Television: Tuning to the Future (2012),co-editor (with Will Gibbons and Neil Lerner) of Music in Video Games: Studying Play (2014), co-edited with Ann-Kristin Wallengren, Today’s Sounds for Yesterday’s Films: Making Music for Silent Cinema (2016), co-edited with Steve Rawle, Hitchcock and Herrmann: Partners in Suspense (2017) and co-edited with Beth Carroll, Contemporary Musical Films (2018).
Occult Aesthetics received an Award from the American Musicological Society in 2013, and Magical Musical Tour was the Winner of the Southwest Popular and American Culture Association’s 2016 Peter C. Rollins Book Award in the category of Film/Television.
I edit the 'Music and the Moving Image' book series for Edinburgh University Press and 'Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture' for Palgrave-Macmillan. I am on the editorial boards of seven journals and have published on subjects as diverse as urban wildlife, dark ambient records and 'troubles tourism' in Northern Ireland.
