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Jonathan Bignell

Jonathan Bignell is Professor of Television and Film in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading, UK.  He is a founding member and Trustee of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Media and Culture (CIRCL) at the University of Reading.  His writing about childhood centres on British and American children’s television, films and toys.  His writing about children’stelevision includes chapters in his monograph Postmodern Media Culture and his jointlyedited collection Popular Television Drama.  He has published articles about children’sfilm and television in the journals Screen, the Yearbook of English Studies and the Journal of British Cinema and Television, and contributed chapters on children’s mediato Children In Culture, Revisited (ed. Lesnik-Oberstein), and British Science Fiction Film and Television (eds Hochscherf and Leggott).  His work on toys includes chapters in War, Culture and the Media (eds Stewart and Curruthers), A Necessary Fantasy (ed. Watkins and Jones) and Indeterminate Bodies (eds Segal, Taylor and Cook).  He is a Corresponding Editor for the journal Critical Studies in Television and serves on the editorial advisory boards of the New Review of Film and Television Studies, the International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, Studies in Documentary Film, theJournal of Popular Television, Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aestheticsand the Journal of Science Fiction Film and Television.  He is a Series Editor of Manchester University Press’s ‘Television Series’, which publishes books about the work of individual screenwriters and producers.  Jonathan is the Director of the Television Drama Studies Research Group at the University of Reading, and since the 1990s he has led collaborative research teams working on six long-term projects: ‘Spaces of Television’ studied the interactions between production technologies and aesthetic forms in television fiction, ‘Acting with Facts’ researched performance modes in dramadocumentary hybrids, ‘British TV Drama and Acquired US Programmes’ analysed relationships between British-made and imported programmes, ‘Beckett and the Phenomenology of Doodles’ studied ephemeral artwork in the collection of Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts at the University of Reading, ‘Cultures of British Television Drama’ investigated histories of popular television fiction, and ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’ studied relationships between dramatic forms in television and theatre.  Jonathan is a Trustee of the Association of Adaptation Studies, serves on the Advisory Committee of the British Association for Modernist Studies, is Co-Chair of the Southern Broadcasting History Group and he is a member of the European Television History Network.

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