Role
I am module leader for Making Film 3: Approaches to Filmmaking, on film style, and also Thinking Film 4: Stars and Audiences. Supervisor for Undergraduate dissertations.
Areas of expertise
- Classical Hollywood. Film Styles
- Film stardom, particularly in relation to gender and politics.
- Film and stage musicals
- Pop music
- Queer histories and representation in film and literature
- Queer childhoods in autobiographical texts
Teaching and supervision
Courses
Research
I have just completed a volume on pop musicals for Columbia University Press. Previously worked on queer film and spectatorship, stardom, and Spanish cinema. Author of the Historical Dictionary of Spanish Cinema and my volume on queer filmmaking Miradas insumisas, published in Spain, among others. Chapters and articles on Jane Fonda, Mario Casas, Pedro Almodóvar, Ivan Zulueta and queer cinephilia. Worked extensively on Hispanic queer autobiographical narratives and currently involved in a project on queer childhoods on film and literature. My 2004 monograph De Sodoma a Chueca, published in Spanish, was the first comprehensive history of gay male cultures in Spain. I have published volumes of translation and critical editions of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest as well as two novels.
Research group membership
I have participated in two research groups on homosexual representation in Spanish culture and on a queer approach to the seventies.
Research grants and awards
Two AHRB grants (2002 and 2006) to work on projects on Homosexual identities in Spain and queer films, both leading to monographs. Queen Sofia Fellowship, Exeter College, Oxford, 1997-1997. I was a Giner de los Rios Visiting professor at the Universidad de Alcalá in 2019. Visiting professorship at Bryn Mawr in 2015.
Research projects
I want to build up on my work for the exhibition I curated for the IVAM museum in Valencia on counterculture for a project on Valencian countercultures in the 1970s and the 1980s that will encompass little-known cultural manifestations such as underground and marginal cinema, queer performance, music and comics.
Currently, my main project is on queer childhood. I have published a number of chapters on cinematic representations of childhood and another cluster on the experience of queer childhood in autobiographical writing. So far I have published on works by Terenci Moix, on queer children and cinephilia, on Eduardo Mendicutti's autobiographical fiction and on the Spanish film Pa Negre (Black Bread).
After publication of my book on The Pop Musical, due at the end of 2019 I would like to develop a more focused project on the musical in the 1970s, which my research suggests is a crucial decade in the evolution of the genre.
Research impact
Recently, my exhibition on Valencian Countercultures at the IVAM, Valencia Modern Art Museum, has generated a lot of media attention as a re-discovery of a number of forgotten cultural manifestations that lay outside the mainstream.
Groups
Publications
Professional information
Consultancy
- I am a consultant for a new musical project for the company Stage Entertainment.
- I have been consultant on queer-oriented materials for Catalan libraries.
Further details
- I teach courses on musical theatre at the Teatro Real, Madrid.
- Curated exhibition on Valencian Counterculture, opening at the IVAM museum 13 February 2020: https://www.ivam.es/en/exposiciones/counter-culture/
My websites:
- In English https://albertomira.com/articulos/ladies-who-lunch-posts-in-english
- In Spanish: http://albertomira.com/