Dr Lucy Bollington
Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Film
SELCS
Faculty of Arts & Humanities
- Joined UCL
- 1st Oct 2018
Research summary
I am a cultural theorist with research interests in film and visual culture since 1960. My work centres on shifting relationships between aesthetics and politics and has addressed topics including conflict, the body, technology, the nonhuman and the concept of excess. I'm currently completing a book entitled Rendered Bodies in Contemporary Artists' Film, which offers a comparative study of the deployment of CGI-rendered avatars (or 'rendered bodies') in films concerned with technology and capitalism made by artists including Hito Steyerl, Ed Atkins and Frances Stark. I have also published on visual confrontations with death and violence in different contexts. I have strong interests in philosophy and critical theory, and my work is closely informed by these discourses.
With Annie Ring (UCL), I am co-editor of Citational Media: Counter-Archives and Technology in Contemporary Visual Culture (forthcoming, 2023), a book examining the political potential of citation across contemporary moving image media. With Paul Merchant (Bristol), I co-edited Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (2020), which explores how discourses of humanism and posthumanism have been marshalled and challenged by artistic and historical texts in the region. I'm currently working on a dossier on 'Screening Hands' with Michele White (Tulane). In 2020, I convened an online theory reading group on 'Internet, Matter, World' with Annie Ring and Emily Baker.
Teaching summary
I lecture across Film and Visual Studies and Comparative Literature.
Biography
BA (Hons) (Warwick, with a year studying abroad at Columbia University); MPhil (Cantab); PhD (Cantab); Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UCL).
Prior to joining the School of European Languages, Culture and Society, I was postdoctoral Junior Research Fellow at UCL's Institute of Advanced Studies.