Dr Shelley Cobb Impact Case Study
Associate Professor of Film, Director of Programmes
Dr Shelley Cobb is an Associate Professor of Film at the University of Southampton.
I am a feminist film and media studies scholar with particular interests in: women filmmakers; equality and diversity in the film and television industries; feminism, postfeminism and popular feminism in media; celebrity culture; adaptation; and reception discourses.
I am the principal investigator for the large AHRC-funded ‘Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary Film Culture in the UK’. The primary research (completed in 2018) included data collection of women working in key roles on film sets and a set of recorded interviews with women working in those positions. The research is the basis for published individual articles and some co-authored with my research partners Linda Ruth Wililams and Natalie Wreyford in The Journal of British Cinema and Television, Feminist Media Histories, and Women’s History Review. The website for the project – womencallingtheshots.com – houses our publicly available reports on the numbers of women working in the British film industry from 2003-2015, as well as information about our team and public impact. The research for Calling the Shots has had wide public awareness with stories in UK newspapers and continues to have impact on the continuing push for equality and diversity in the film and TV industries.
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 co-editor, with Neil Ewen (University of Winchester) of First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics (September 2015) and have published articles and chapters on women’s film authorship; black women filmmakers’ rom coms; gender, sexuality and celebrity; adaptation theory; chick flicks; and race in the sitcom Friends.
Qualifications
BA, Creative Writing & English, University of Southern California 1994
MA, English & Comparative Literature, Chapman University 2002
MFA, Creative Writing, Chapman University 2002
PhD, Film & Television Studies, University of East Anglia 2008