Postgraduate Researchers

Mark Harrison

Mark I. Harrison is a PhD researcher investigating the stardom of Dwayne Johnson. Titled ‘Dwayne Johnson: The Franchise Star’, Mark’s work looks to understand the state of contemporary Hollywood stardom through the analysis of Johnson as both a performer and a celebrity. Mark is a member of BAFTSS and served on the editorial board of The Hive Journal for its first three issues. When he’s not working, you can usually find Mark either at the cinema or at the match. You can follow Mark on Letterboxd here.

Karmel Knipprath

Karmel Knipprath is a PhD researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research project, titled ‘Clive Barker’s Transmedial Gothic, 1978-present’, formally identifies Clive Barker as an important yet critically undervalued British polymath who has successfully advanced, expanded, and altered the formal, aesthetic and political parameters of various media through his unique deployment of the contemporary Gothic mode.

Brontë Schiltz

Brontë Schiltz is a PhD researcher working on the use of the Gothic to articulate crises in the British television industry. Titled ‘Televisual Gothic: Terror, Transmission and the BBC, 1953-2024’, her thesis traces this broadcasting tradition from Nigel Kneale’s efforts to raise the alarm on television’s direction of travel in the 1950s-1970s, through resistance to neoliberal broadcasting reforms in Ghostwatch and various Doctor Who serials in the 1980s-2000s, to attempts to break through an exhausted acceptance of permacrisis in Red Rose and various episodes of Inside No. 9 in the 2010s-2020s.

Emily Sullivan

Emily’s research explores representations of gender within Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and their reinterpretation in contemporary film and game adaptations. It examines how adolescent readers engage with these portrayals, and how they shape experiences of gender performance and agency. Using an intersectional feminist framework, alongside postcolonial and children’s literature theory, this project investigates what Tolkien’s work and its adaptations communicate to young audiences about gender, power, and identity.