Dr Sofia Bull

• Television studies
• Science, medicine and policing on television
• Medical humanities
• Feminist film history
• Early film titling

Dr Sofia Bull’s research focuses on the theory and cultural significance of television, with particular interest in the representation of science, medicine, and policing across the UK, US, and Scandinavia. Her areas of expertise include the portrayal of forensic science and fraud on television, as well as broader trends in both crime drama and true‑crime formats. She has also published on medical reality programming, especially shows depicting midwifery and childbirth. Her monograph Television and the Genetic Imaginary (Palgrave, 2019) examinecultural discourses on DNA across a wide range of US and UK television genres. Exploring the common use of molecular imagery and microscopic CGI, the book identifies television as a key site for contemporary public debates on genetics and genomics.

Sofia is currently working on a new project that more broadly explores how television encourages viewers to think across multiple scales, from the intimate to the planetary. In forthcoming publications, she shows how contemporary serial dramas, live broadcasting events, and television news use visual, narrative, and thematic strategies that prompt recurring shifts in perspective, encouraging viewers to recentre everyday experience through scalar thinking. This includes an analysis of how Covid‑19 news coverage compelled audiences to orient themselves spatially within networks of viral transmission that ranged from microscopic particles to global patterns of contagion. Across the different strands of this project, she argues that television cultivates accessible habits of multi‑scalar awareness in daily life.

Additionally, Sofia also has a long‑standing research interest in feminist film history. She has contributed to the Women Film Pioneers Project in several roles, and she is the leading expert on Alva Lundin, Sweden’s most prolific film title designer.