Dr. Shelley Cobb is the Principle Investigator of Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary Film Culture in the UK, 2000-2015.
Shelley has had a long-standing interest in women’s authorship across film and literature, and other media and art forms, in terms of both what women produce and the histories of
women’s authorship that are always marginalized in mainstream discourses and often lost altogether. Calling the Shots has been on her mind, in various forms, since the early days of her research degree when the low numbers of women working in the film industry did not receive the media attention they do today.
Recently she published her first monograph Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), which considers the figure of the woman author onscreen, behind the screen, and in extra-textual media discourses of contemporary film adaptations directed by women. The book is a development of her PhD thesis that sought to re-think women’s film authorship and film adaptation through the metaphor of conversation. She has also published articles on Jane Campion and the authorship of Bridget Jones’s Diary, and writes more widely about the politics of gender in popular culture.
Her outputs from the grant will include a monograph on women’s co-productions (funded by both the UK and at least one other nation) a special journal edition on contemporary women filmmakers, and the annual reports on the numbers of women working in the UK film industry; the latter two will be co-edited with Linda Williams and Natalie Wreyford. Shelley has given public talks and contributed to panels about women and film at the Insitute of Contemporary Arts, the British Film Institute, and the Underwire Festival.
In addition to her work on women and film, she also researches celebrity culture and is the co-editor (with Neil Ewen) of First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics (2015). Her work has appeared in Genders online journal, Celebrity Studies, Social Semiotics, and several edited collections.
Calling the Shots 