Dr Shelley Cobb
Director of Programmes, TEF Rep, Impact Case Study
Dr Shelley Cobb is an Associate Professor of Film at the University of Southampton.
My main areas of research and teaching expertise are in women and film (both production and representation), gender and popular culture, celebrity studies and adaptation.
I hold a BA in English from the University of Southern California, and two postgraduate degrees from Chapman University in California: an MA in English and Comparative Literature, and an MFA in Creative Writing. My PhD is from The School of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, where I taught in the Film and Television Studies, Literature and Creative Writing, and American Studies. I joined the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Southampton in 2008 and have taught Film Adaptation for the English department alongside Women and Hollywood for Film.
My articles and chapters on women filmmakers, gender and contemporary Hollywood, film adaptation, and celebrity culture appear in a range of journals as well as edited collections.
Currently, I am the Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded project Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary Film Culture in the UK, 2000-2015 (dates: Sept 2014 – September 2018). This project is counting the number of women working on British films in key production roles from 2000-2015 and recording interviews with 50 women filmmakers. To learn more about the project go to www.southampton.ac.uk/cswf
My monograph, Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Palgrave-Macmillan, November 2014) considers film adaptations directed by women that foreground the figure of the female author, through analysis of the films themselves, their reception, and discussion of the cultural and industrial contexts in which these films were released.
I am also the co-editor (with Neil Ewen) of First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics published by Bloomsbury in September 2015.
In 2014, I became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.