BOOKS
BFI Classics Series: The Empire Strikes Back (forthcoming, BFI 2020).
Decoding Star Wars: Gender, Race and the Power of Code in a Galaxy Far, Far Away (forthcoming, Bloomsbury 2022).
From Steam to Screen: Cinema, the Railways and Modernity (I B Tauris, 2018) - available here.
RADIO AND TELEVISION
BBC Radio Scotland The Afternoon Show, Film Reviews, various dates, films including Animals, The Dead Don’t Die, etc.
James Bond and the representation of black women, BBC Radio Scotland, July 16, 2019.
James Bond and the representation of women, BBC Radio Scotland, May 10, 2019.
LGBT representation in the Marvel franchise, BBC Radio Scotland, May 8, 2019.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Bond, The Nine, BBC Scotland, April 15, 2019.
“Russian Trolls 'Pushed their Agenda' with Star Wars Critiques, Study Suggests,” The Current, CBC Radio (Canada), October 8, 2018 - listen here or read a transcript here.
Women's clothing and safety in public space, Drive Time, BBC Three Counties Radio, September 4, 2018. You can listen to the interview at the bottom of the page.
Creative Scotland and Scottish television funding, Scotland Tonight, STV, August 21, 2018.
Star Wars and representation, Fan Girls Going Rogue podcast, June 27, 2018 - listen here.
Star Wars and screen time for women, Newsdrive, BBC Radio Scotland, June 1, 2018 - listen here.
“Why Solo Never Wants to Know the Odds,” Beyond Bechdel podcast, June 2, 2018 - listen here.
Netflix and the Cannes Film Festival, Scotland Tonight, STV, March 2018. You can watch the interview at the bottom of the page.
“Projectionettes,” Bums on Seats, Cambridge Radio, April 25, 2017 - listen here.
‘Mabel Normand,’ Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, August 2015. Interview on Mabel Normand and women filmmakers in early Hollywood - listen here.
ARTICLES AND REVIEWS
“Dark Rey – A New LGBT Hope?” Screen Queens, September 5, 2019 – read it here.
“Which is the sexiest train? (*in Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Starlight Express),” City Metric, July 23, 2019 (with Penny Andrews) – read it here.
“What Should Have Won the 2019 Cannes Palme d’Or?” Sight & Sound, May 26, 2019 (contributor) – read it here.
“Cannes: Bull Director Annie Silverstein on Rodeo Culture and the Realities of On-Set Childcare,” Women & Hollywood, May 24, 2019 – read it here.
“Cannes 2019 Review: Lux Æterna Reveals the Eternal Darkness of Cinema Made by Men,” Birth, Movies, Death, May 20, 2019 – read it here.
“Cannes 2019 Review: Pain And Glory is a Bittersweet Journey to the Heart of a Cinephile,” Birth, Movies, Death, May 20, 2019 – read it here.
“Too Old to Die Young first look: Nicolas Winding Refn Depopulates the Small Screen,” Sight & Sound, May 18, 2019 – read it here.
“Rocketman review: An Out and Proud Elton John Musical Biopic,” Sight & Sound, May 17, 2019 – read it here.
“Bull first look: A Bucking Portrait of a Rodeoing Odd Couple,” Sight & Sound, May 16, 2019 – read it here.
“Glasgow Film Festival 2019: A Vital Antidote to One-Size Cinema,” Sight and Sound, March 13, 2019 - read it here.
“Book Review: Star Wars: Queen’s Shadow Is the Padmé Story Her Fans Deserve,” The Mary Sue, March 9, 2019 - read it here.
“Book Review: Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds Puts Hawkins’ Past in a New Perspective,” The Mary Sue, February 13, 2019 - read it here.
“Why is Star Wars' Inclusiveness Getting So Much Hate Now When It Was Celebrated in the Past?” The Mary Sue, September 10, 2018 - read it here.
“Alienation and the Limits of Access at Edinburgh 2018,” Sight and Sound, July 11, 2018 - read it here.
“George Michael: Freedom First-Look Review,” Little White Lies, June 26, 2018 - read it here.
“From Ocean’s 8 to #MeToo: Why the Gender Bias in Film Criticism Matters,” Prospect Magazine, June 21, 2018 - read it here.
“Why I Decided to Cut All the Men Out of Star Wars, and What it Showed Me,” Women and Hollywood, June 11, 2018 - read it here.
“Star Wars, I Love You… But Solo Needed to Stop Saying ‘I Know’,” Medium, June 3, 2018 - read it here.
“Cannes First Look: Little Tickles is an Unflinching Exploration of Abuse and Therapy,” Sight and Sound, May 24, 2018 - read it here.
“Raze the Red carpet: Cannes 2018 Responds to #MeToo,” Sight and Sound, May 21, 2018 - read it here.
“Cannes First Look: My Favourite Fabric Unwraps Women's Lives in the Arab Spring,” Sight and Sound, May 16, 2018 - read it here.
“Athena SWAN is an Ugly Duckling,” Times Higher Education Supplement, May 3, 2018 - read it here.
“On Brilliance: Making Light of Women's Creative Labour,” MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, May 1, 2018 - read it here.
“What Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Cat Person Have in Common,” New Statesman, December 18, 2017 (coauthored) - read it here.
“The Last Jedi: Latest Star Wars is a Fable for Our Post-Truth Times,” The Conversation, December 15, 2017 - read it here.
“It Makes Perfect Sense that Princess Leia Should Have a PhD – But We Need More Female Academics,” The Conversation, September 7, 2017 - read it here.
“La La Land Deserves its 14 Oscar Nominations for Asking Us, Quite Simply, to Feel,” The Conversation, February 22, 2017 - read it here.
‘Who Were Mack & Mabel?’ Mack & Mabel theatre programme, Chichester Theatre and UK touring editions, 2015.
IN THE NEWS - INTERVIEWS
“Star Wars Ranked on Screen Time for Women,” BBC News, June 1, 2018 - read it here.
Rachel Thompson, “Professor Ranks Star Wars for Female Character Screen Time and the Results are Very Telling,” Mashable, May 31, 2018 - read it here.
Marc Horne, “How Star Wars Satirises Trump,” Times, January 11, 2018, p.10 - interviewee, includes coverage of my forthcoming Star Wars book - read it here.
Liz Dwyer, “Move Over, ‘Princess’ — Leia Organa, PhD, Is Here,” Good Magazine, August 7, 2017 - interviewed about Star Wars, feminism and working as a woman academic - read it here.
Maddy Searle, “Why Nothing Has Changed for Women in Film Since the Heyday of Liz Taylor,” Sunday Herald, October 2, 2016 - contributor on early women filmmakers - read it here.
My Star Wars work has also been discussed in publications including: Indiewire, Telegraph, Bustle, Syfy, Hollywood Reporter, Time, Vanity Fair and Teen Vogue, among others.
BLOG CONTRIBUTOR
'Shooting Stars: Review,' Brent on Film - read online here.
‘Making Yet More Noise: Interviewing the Women Behind the New BFI Suffragettes in Silent Film Collection,’ Brent on Film - read online here.
'Cinematic Memory, Consumer Culture and Everyday Life' blogger for the Autopsies Research Group, UCL Film Studies Space - read online here.
ACADEMIC ARTICLES
You can download PDFs of all my single-authored articles (pre-copy-editing versions) below.
“Gender, Race, and Representation in the Star Wars Franchise: An Introduction,” Media Education Journal, no. 65 (2019): 16-19.
The article offers a short and accessible introductory analysis of gender and race representation in the Star Wars franchise and is a resource for teachers and students in secondary education/high school classrooms. You can download the pdf at the bottom of the page.
“Fuck the Canon (or, How Do You Solve a Problem Like von Trier?): Teaching, Screening, and Writing About Cinema in the Age of #MeToo,” MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture 1, no. 2 (2018): online - read it here.
Richard Wallace, Rebecca Harrison, and Charlotte Brunsdon, “Toward a History of Women Projectionists in Post-war British Cinemas,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 15, no. 1 (2017): 46-65.
“The Coming of the Projectionettes”: Women’s Work in Film Projection and Changing Modes of Spectatorship in Second World War British Cinemas,' Feminist Media Histories 2, no. 2 (2016).
This article investigates women’s roles as projectionists, and transformations to women’s spectatorship, in Britain during the Second World War. Between 1939 and 1945, the British Cinema Exhibition Association (CEA), among other organisation, encouraged women to train as cinema projectionists when the government conscripted men into the armed forces. Here, the paper traces histories of the ‘projectionettes’ and their daily, working lives through archival materials and the trade press to consider how women’s labour contributed to British film exhibition. Moreover, by situating the women projectionists’ work in a broader narrative about gendered spectatorship, the article proposes that owing to changing labour conditions, women gained new perspectives throughout the movie theatre.
‘Writing History on the Page and Screen: Mediating Conflict through Britain’s First World War Ambulance Trains,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35, no. 3 (2015).
This article examines how different forms of writing mediate the past. In doing so, I focus on two ostensibly distinct types of authorship: the light writing projected onscreen, and the life-writings found in letters and diaries. Between 1914 and 1919 in Britain, cinema and personal testimonies intervened in historiography in apparent opposition to one another. It is easy for us now to assume that state-censored, propagandistic movies narrated the state’s version of the First World War, while secret, illegal accounts written by personnel on the Front line described actuality. However, a study of British ambulance trains reveals that films and life-writings have a shared vocabulary, which complicates the two media’s connections to history, and to one another.
‘Inside the Cinema Train: Britain, Empire and Modernity in the Twentieth Century,’ Film History 26, no.4 (2014): 32-57.
The article offers the first comprehensive examination of the cinema train in Britain. From film’s inception to the present day, journeys, movement and travel have been inscribed in the language, aesthetics and distribution of film. The paper argues that the history of the movie coach expands our understanding of exhibition and distribution networks in twentieth-century Britain, particularly with regard to news consumption. Using contemporary press reports, archived documents and the newsreels shown in the carriages, the article also articulates how narratives about the nation’s empire and self-projected modernity influenced the cinema train’s construction.
'Haunted Screens and Spiritual Scenes: Film as a Medium in the Cinema of Carl Theodor Dreyer,' Scandinavica 48, no. 1 (2009): 31-36.
In exploring the nature of cinematic self-reflexivity, the article investigates the relationship between the medium of film and Dreyer’s interest in the spiritual and religious experience. It draws upon Freud’s concept of the ‘Uncanny’ to determine the boundaries of cinematic space and time in relation to the transience of life and death, as represented onscreen.
BFI Classics Series: The Empire Strikes Back (forthcoming, BFI 2020).
Decoding Star Wars: Gender, Race and the Power of Code in a Galaxy Far, Far Away (forthcoming, Bloomsbury 2022).
From Steam to Screen: Cinema, the Railways and Modernity (I B Tauris, 2018) - available here.
RADIO AND TELEVISION
BBC Radio Scotland The Afternoon Show, Film Reviews, various dates, films including Animals, The Dead Don’t Die, etc.
James Bond and the representation of black women, BBC Radio Scotland, July 16, 2019.
James Bond and the representation of women, BBC Radio Scotland, May 10, 2019.
LGBT representation in the Marvel franchise, BBC Radio Scotland, May 8, 2019.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Bond, The Nine, BBC Scotland, April 15, 2019.
“Russian Trolls 'Pushed their Agenda' with Star Wars Critiques, Study Suggests,” The Current, CBC Radio (Canada), October 8, 2018 - listen here or read a transcript here.
Women's clothing and safety in public space, Drive Time, BBC Three Counties Radio, September 4, 2018. You can listen to the interview at the bottom of the page.
Creative Scotland and Scottish television funding, Scotland Tonight, STV, August 21, 2018.
Star Wars and representation, Fan Girls Going Rogue podcast, June 27, 2018 - listen here.
Star Wars and screen time for women, Newsdrive, BBC Radio Scotland, June 1, 2018 - listen here.
“Why Solo Never Wants to Know the Odds,” Beyond Bechdel podcast, June 2, 2018 - listen here.
Netflix and the Cannes Film Festival, Scotland Tonight, STV, March 2018. You can watch the interview at the bottom of the page.
“Projectionettes,” Bums on Seats, Cambridge Radio, April 25, 2017 - listen here.
‘Mabel Normand,’ Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, August 2015. Interview on Mabel Normand and women filmmakers in early Hollywood - listen here.
ARTICLES AND REVIEWS
“Dark Rey – A New LGBT Hope?” Screen Queens, September 5, 2019 – read it here.
“Which is the sexiest train? (*in Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Starlight Express),” City Metric, July 23, 2019 (with Penny Andrews) – read it here.
“What Should Have Won the 2019 Cannes Palme d’Or?” Sight & Sound, May 26, 2019 (contributor) – read it here.
“Cannes: Bull Director Annie Silverstein on Rodeo Culture and the Realities of On-Set Childcare,” Women & Hollywood, May 24, 2019 – read it here.
“Cannes 2019 Review: Lux Æterna Reveals the Eternal Darkness of Cinema Made by Men,” Birth, Movies, Death, May 20, 2019 – read it here.
“Cannes 2019 Review: Pain And Glory is a Bittersweet Journey to the Heart of a Cinephile,” Birth, Movies, Death, May 20, 2019 – read it here.
“Too Old to Die Young first look: Nicolas Winding Refn Depopulates the Small Screen,” Sight & Sound, May 18, 2019 – read it here.
“Rocketman review: An Out and Proud Elton John Musical Biopic,” Sight & Sound, May 17, 2019 – read it here.
“Bull first look: A Bucking Portrait of a Rodeoing Odd Couple,” Sight & Sound, May 16, 2019 – read it here.
“Glasgow Film Festival 2019: A Vital Antidote to One-Size Cinema,” Sight and Sound, March 13, 2019 - read it here.
“Book Review: Star Wars: Queen’s Shadow Is the Padmé Story Her Fans Deserve,” The Mary Sue, March 9, 2019 - read it here.
“Book Review: Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds Puts Hawkins’ Past in a New Perspective,” The Mary Sue, February 13, 2019 - read it here.
“Why is Star Wars' Inclusiveness Getting So Much Hate Now When It Was Celebrated in the Past?” The Mary Sue, September 10, 2018 - read it here.
“Alienation and the Limits of Access at Edinburgh 2018,” Sight and Sound, July 11, 2018 - read it here.
“George Michael: Freedom First-Look Review,” Little White Lies, June 26, 2018 - read it here.
“From Ocean’s 8 to #MeToo: Why the Gender Bias in Film Criticism Matters,” Prospect Magazine, June 21, 2018 - read it here.
“Why I Decided to Cut All the Men Out of Star Wars, and What it Showed Me,” Women and Hollywood, June 11, 2018 - read it here.
“Star Wars, I Love You… But Solo Needed to Stop Saying ‘I Know’,” Medium, June 3, 2018 - read it here.
“Cannes First Look: Little Tickles is an Unflinching Exploration of Abuse and Therapy,” Sight and Sound, May 24, 2018 - read it here.
“Raze the Red carpet: Cannes 2018 Responds to #MeToo,” Sight and Sound, May 21, 2018 - read it here.
“Cannes First Look: My Favourite Fabric Unwraps Women's Lives in the Arab Spring,” Sight and Sound, May 16, 2018 - read it here.
“Athena SWAN is an Ugly Duckling,” Times Higher Education Supplement, May 3, 2018 - read it here.
“On Brilliance: Making Light of Women's Creative Labour,” MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, May 1, 2018 - read it here.
“What Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Cat Person Have in Common,” New Statesman, December 18, 2017 (coauthored) - read it here.
“The Last Jedi: Latest Star Wars is a Fable for Our Post-Truth Times,” The Conversation, December 15, 2017 - read it here.
“It Makes Perfect Sense that Princess Leia Should Have a PhD – But We Need More Female Academics,” The Conversation, September 7, 2017 - read it here.
“La La Land Deserves its 14 Oscar Nominations for Asking Us, Quite Simply, to Feel,” The Conversation, February 22, 2017 - read it here.
‘Who Were Mack & Mabel?’ Mack & Mabel theatre programme, Chichester Theatre and UK touring editions, 2015.
IN THE NEWS - INTERVIEWS
“Star Wars Ranked on Screen Time for Women,” BBC News, June 1, 2018 - read it here.
Rachel Thompson, “Professor Ranks Star Wars for Female Character Screen Time and the Results are Very Telling,” Mashable, May 31, 2018 - read it here.
Marc Horne, “How Star Wars Satirises Trump,” Times, January 11, 2018, p.10 - interviewee, includes coverage of my forthcoming Star Wars book - read it here.
Liz Dwyer, “Move Over, ‘Princess’ — Leia Organa, PhD, Is Here,” Good Magazine, August 7, 2017 - interviewed about Star Wars, feminism and working as a woman academic - read it here.
Maddy Searle, “Why Nothing Has Changed for Women in Film Since the Heyday of Liz Taylor,” Sunday Herald, October 2, 2016 - contributor on early women filmmakers - read it here.
My Star Wars work has also been discussed in publications including: Indiewire, Telegraph, Bustle, Syfy, Hollywood Reporter, Time, Vanity Fair and Teen Vogue, among others.
BLOG CONTRIBUTOR
'Shooting Stars: Review,' Brent on Film - read online here.
‘Making Yet More Noise: Interviewing the Women Behind the New BFI Suffragettes in Silent Film Collection,’ Brent on Film - read online here.
'Cinematic Memory, Consumer Culture and Everyday Life' blogger for the Autopsies Research Group, UCL Film Studies Space - read online here.
ACADEMIC ARTICLES
You can download PDFs of all my single-authored articles (pre-copy-editing versions) below.
“Gender, Race, and Representation in the Star Wars Franchise: An Introduction,” Media Education Journal, no. 65 (2019): 16-19.
The article offers a short and accessible introductory analysis of gender and race representation in the Star Wars franchise and is a resource for teachers and students in secondary education/high school classrooms. You can download the pdf at the bottom of the page.
“Fuck the Canon (or, How Do You Solve a Problem Like von Trier?): Teaching, Screening, and Writing About Cinema in the Age of #MeToo,” MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture 1, no. 2 (2018): online - read it here.
Richard Wallace, Rebecca Harrison, and Charlotte Brunsdon, “Toward a History of Women Projectionists in Post-war British Cinemas,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 15, no. 1 (2017): 46-65.
“The Coming of the Projectionettes”: Women’s Work in Film Projection and Changing Modes of Spectatorship in Second World War British Cinemas,' Feminist Media Histories 2, no. 2 (2016).
This article investigates women’s roles as projectionists, and transformations to women’s spectatorship, in Britain during the Second World War. Between 1939 and 1945, the British Cinema Exhibition Association (CEA), among other organisation, encouraged women to train as cinema projectionists when the government conscripted men into the armed forces. Here, the paper traces histories of the ‘projectionettes’ and their daily, working lives through archival materials and the trade press to consider how women’s labour contributed to British film exhibition. Moreover, by situating the women projectionists’ work in a broader narrative about gendered spectatorship, the article proposes that owing to changing labour conditions, women gained new perspectives throughout the movie theatre.
‘Writing History on the Page and Screen: Mediating Conflict through Britain’s First World War Ambulance Trains,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35, no. 3 (2015).
This article examines how different forms of writing mediate the past. In doing so, I focus on two ostensibly distinct types of authorship: the light writing projected onscreen, and the life-writings found in letters and diaries. Between 1914 and 1919 in Britain, cinema and personal testimonies intervened in historiography in apparent opposition to one another. It is easy for us now to assume that state-censored, propagandistic movies narrated the state’s version of the First World War, while secret, illegal accounts written by personnel on the Front line described actuality. However, a study of British ambulance trains reveals that films and life-writings have a shared vocabulary, which complicates the two media’s connections to history, and to one another.
‘Inside the Cinema Train: Britain, Empire and Modernity in the Twentieth Century,’ Film History 26, no.4 (2014): 32-57.
The article offers the first comprehensive examination of the cinema train in Britain. From film’s inception to the present day, journeys, movement and travel have been inscribed in the language, aesthetics and distribution of film. The paper argues that the history of the movie coach expands our understanding of exhibition and distribution networks in twentieth-century Britain, particularly with regard to news consumption. Using contemporary press reports, archived documents and the newsreels shown in the carriages, the article also articulates how narratives about the nation’s empire and self-projected modernity influenced the cinema train’s construction.
'Haunted Screens and Spiritual Scenes: Film as a Medium in the Cinema of Carl Theodor Dreyer,' Scandinavica 48, no. 1 (2009): 31-36.
In exploring the nature of cinematic self-reflexivity, the article investigates the relationship between the medium of film and Dreyer’s interest in the spiritual and religious experience. It draws upon Freud’s concept of the ‘Uncanny’ to determine the boundaries of cinematic space and time in relation to the transience of life and death, as represented onscreen.
| bbc3c_interview.mp4 |
| rharrison_-_gender_and_race_in_star_wars.pdf |
| rharrison_inside_the_cinema_train_working_paper.pdf |
| r_harrison_haunted_screens_scandinavica_2009.pdf |
| rharrison_-_writing_history_on_the_page_and_screen_working_copy.pdf |
| rharrison_coming_of_the_projectionettes_working_copy.pdf |