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Dr Joana De Amil Da Costa Jacob Ramalho
Senior Teaching Fellow
SELCS
Faculty of Arts & Humanities
- Joined UCL
- 1st Jan 2010
Research summary
My research focuses on:
- the Gothic (film, television, music and literature);
- the connections and overlaps between Romanticism, the Gothic and Victorianism;
- cinematic representations of death, memory, mourning and the senses;
- intermediality, generic hybridity and gender politics;
- film musicals and musical moments in film and television;
- radical humour and political correctness.
I have published on thresholds, haptic motifs and sensory contagion in Gothic terror cinema; thing theory and the figure of the doll in Gothic and horror productions; and the role of portraits in 1940s psychological thrillers. I have presented my work at several international conferences in the UK, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Austria and Portugal. Since 2017, I have been a reviewer for the online journal Fantastika.
My current research project deploys the concept of carnival to investigate the ways in which specific forms of entertainment (low art, film, live-cinema, and dark cabaret artists) rewrite and externalise the convoluted dispute between an official culture and its rejects, while commenting on the failings of post-millennial socio-political systems and their neglect of subcultures and gender minorities.
I welcome proposals for UG, MA and PhD projects that focus on or overlap with any of the research specialisms above.
Teaching summary
At undergraduate level, I currently teach Spanish cinema (SPAN0042 - Spanish Film From the 1990s) and Portuguese language and Lusophone culture (PORT0002, PORT0005 and PORT0008). At postgraduate level, I contribute to the Translation Studies MA (PORT0011 - Translation From and Into Portuguese) and deliver an optional module for the MA in Comparative Literature: CMII0078 - The Gothic: Reading for Defilement.
Education
- University College London
- , | 2015
- University College London
- , | 2015
- University College London
- , | 2009
Biography
Advice and Feedback Hours (FC312/313)
Term 1 — Mondays, 3-4pm (weeks 6-10) or by appointment; Thursdays, 12-1pm (weeks 12-16) or by appointment.
Term 2 — Mondays, 3-4pm or by appointment.
I studied Communication Sciences and Journalism at the New University of Lisbon (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). I gained my master's degree in Film Studies (UCL) in 2009. My dissertation focused on the disenchanted worlds of Vincente Minnelli's comedies, musicals and melodramas. In September 2009, I joined the department of Spanish and Latin American Studies, where I developed the programme for the first Portuguese language module in the department. I have contributed to curriculum development at UCL with the introduction of three language modules (PORT0001; PORT0005; PORT0008) and one film module on Gothic Cinema, which ran in 2016. I completed my PhD on the transatlantic Romantic-Gothic films of early émigré and exile directors at the UCL Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (CMII) in 2015. I became Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) in 2015 and achieved a UCL Arena Fellowship the following year.