Screen and Cultural Studies
Our program examines the history and practice of contemporary culture and screen media. Our research looks at the production, aesthetics, circulation, consumption and uses of contemporary and historical screen media and cultures, global and local studies of sexuality, race, cities, migration, youth and cultural industries, and the environmental and social impacts and uses of cultural practice.
Screen and Cultural Studies at Melbourne
The Screen and Cultural Studies program focuses on cultural texts, sites and practices to explore cultures and screen media, analysing their evolution, politics, social function and embedding in everyday life.
Academic staff in the Screen and Cultural Studies program are published writers, industry professionals, and leading researchers in the following areas:
- Asian media (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South East Asia)
- Migration and media globalisation
- Critical fashion studies
- Critical television studies
- Digital media and new media arts
- Lifestyle and commodity cultures
- Feminist, queer, gender and intersectional theory
- Affect, trauma and psychoanalysis
- Youth, new media, and political subjectivity
- Colonialism, postcolonialism and the decolonial
- Film and media industries and cultural policy
- Film and media histories (Hollywood, Art, European, Australian)
- Ecocritical media and cultural studies
- Cultures of crisis
The program has strong connections to the Research Unit in Public Cultures, Human Rights and Animal Ethics Research Network, Centre for Enlightenment, Romanticism and Contemporary Culture, Critical Fashion Studies research collective and the Melbourne Screen Studies Group.
In the 21st century, we inherit the challenges of patriarchy and colonialism, and add new challenges of climate change and contagious illnesses. Culture has never been stable or static. In our times, it changes faster and with deeper consequences, from consumerism to new populist governments, communal violence and an epidemic of mental illness. By paying close attention to the movements of culture, from interpersonal relations to the political economy of supply chains, and the increasingly swift and interactive screen media that increasingly represent and reconfigure these trends in real time, Screen and Cultural Studies connects the intimate and the global so that we can understand and intervene in the upheavals of our times.
Professor Sean Cubitt, Head of Screen and Cultural Studies
Featured research and engagement projects
The Screen and Cultural Studies program has a successful record of receiving external and university funding for research projects, including from the Australian Research Council (ARC).
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Digital Photography: Mediation, Memory And Visual Communication
This project aims to address the social impact of major shifts in the production, distribution, viewing and storage of photographic images which have profoundly altered their everyday use.
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Modernism, Cosmopolitanism And Consumer Culture
This project aims to investigate the department store as a significant site for the transnational dissemination of modernism and cosmopolitanism in the first half of the 20th century.
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Remaking The Australian Environment Through Documentary Film And Television
This project aims to investigate how documentary film, television and online media have transformed our sense of the Australian environment since the 1950s.
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Superheroes: Creative Force, Cultutral Zeitgeist And Transmedia Phenomenon
The project aims to explore the historic, creative and artistic development of comic book heroes across multiple media and their political and social significance.
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Transforming Cultural Identity: Media Flows Between Australia And East Asia
This project examines East Asian media reach in to Australian audiences via new media, and Australian media industries reaching out to Asia via transnational co-productions.
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Aesthetic Politics
This project sets out to establish terms for an ecocritical aesthetics for the 21st century in three thematic groups, Truth, The Good and Beauty.
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Screening Ideas
Screening Ideas is a public program celebrating the power and influence of film. With a focus on work from emerging scholars and filmmakers, the series pairs free film screenings with live panel events, lectures, and conversations.
Learn about our research centres and units
Study with us
Screen and Cultural Studies graduates pursue careers in industries that include the not for profit sector, curatorship, cultural policy/cultural industries, media, government, education and academia.
Undergraduate
Graduate coursework
- Graduate Certificate in Arts
- Graduate Diploma in Arts
- Graduate Certificate in Arts (Advanced)
- Graduate Diploma in Arts (Advanced)
Graduate research
Meet our Screen and Cultural Studies staff
The Screen and Cultural Studies program is recognised nationally and internationally for innovative teaching, scholarship and research. Our staff are prominent researchers in their areas of expertise across our unique program.
