Dr Glyn Davis is a theorist and historian of the moving image. Although he has researched and written extensively about film and television, he has a particular interest in experimental cinema and artists’ film and video. Before taking up his position as a Chancellor's Fellow and Reader at the University of Edinburgh, Glyn was a senior lecturer in screen studies at the University of Bristol (2005-2008), and the coordinator of postgraduate studies at The Glasgow School of Art (2008-2012).
Glyn is the project leader of 'Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures', funded by HERA. 'Cruising the 1970s' launched on 15 July 2016, and will run until July 2019. The project involves partner research teams based in Germany, Poland, Spain and the UK. 'Cruising the 1970s' asks: how might we best reconstruct and understand LGBTQ social and sexual cultures from the decade between the advent of an international gay rights movement and the first reported cases of HIV/AIDS, and what can this knowledge contribute to understandings of queer politics and identity in Europe's present and future?
Glyn’s main research project as a Chancellor’s Fellow explored the relationships between cinema and boredom: boredom as an authorial, aesthetic and affective strategy used by directors; durational cinema experiences; the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of ‘slow cinema’. He also examined the ways in which boredom (and related experiences: exhaustion, ennui, etc) is deployed or harnessed by other cultural forms - literature, music, and so on. The results of this research will be published in a forthcoming monograph entitled The Exhausted Screen: Cinema, Boredom, Stasis.
Glyn oversaw the ‘Art and its Histories’ strand of the Artist Rooms partnership, a major collaboration between (amongst others) the University of Edinburgh, the National Galleries of Scotland, and Tate Galleries. Glyn’s own large-scale project relating to the Artist Rooms partnership was a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the work of Andy Warhol. This first ran in April/May 2014, and then for a second time in February/March 2015; in total, the course had more than 42,000 participants.
Glyn is keen to supervise PhD students with interests in experimental cinema, artists' film and video, queer film and theory, queer history and politics, world cinema and transnational film.
