Book Launch: The Sensory Child of Contemporary Cinema, w. Nonie May

Thursday 9 April,  5:30pm-7pm
Arts West Level 5 Research Lounge
University of Melbourne (Parkville campus) 

Please join us for the launch of Dr Nonie May's The Sensory Child of Contemporary Cinema (Film Cultures in Transition Series, Amsterdam UP, 2025). Professor Barbara Creed (UniMelb) will introduce the evening, before Associate Professor Jessica Balanzategui (RMIT) offers her reflections on the book.

Light refreshments will be available on arrival, from 5.30pm.

The event is free to attend but registration is essential.

About the book:

The Sensory Child of Contemporary Cinema examines a poetic film form evident in contemporary cinema that seems intent on capturing the textures, the materials, and the sensations of childhood. These films foreground the child’s point of view, construct a child’s gaze, and mobilise an aesthetic that evokes a sensory recollection of childhood. This complex arrangement of aesthetic modes is intended to address the adult spectator bodily, and evoke the vivid, sensory memories of childhood. The Sensory Child rethinks a gap in contemporary film theory created by a seeming hiatus between psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches to the cinema. The book examines key instances of this aesthetic of childhood in the films Aftersun (2022), The Fits (2015), What Maisie Knew (2013), and Moonlight (2016). May argues that psychoanalytic theory can elucidate the significance of such tactile moments, offering insight into the meaning evoked for the spectator by this sensory, poetic film form.

Available for purchase with 20% Discount with Code 25AFLY4 here.

Speaker bios:

Nonie May is a Lecturer in Screen and Cultural Studies at The University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research mobilises feminist approaches to psychoanalytic film theory. Recent publications include the BarbieDossier for Feminist Media Studies, (2024), the chapter ‘Written on the Body’,  in the edited collection The UnDead Child (2024), and the prize-winning essay An Cailín Ciúin’ for Senses of Cinema (2022).

Jessica Balanzategui is Associate Professor in Media and Cinema in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. She is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Industry Fellow (2025-27) researching young people's streaming media cultures, and she leads an ARC Discovery Project on how children engage with 'gamble-play' media. Jessica is Founding and Chief Editor of Amsterdam University Press's book series, Horror and Gothic Media Cultures. Jessica's research on the interface between technological and industrial transformation and entertainment cultures has been widely published in the leading international journals in her field, including New Media and Society, Convergence, The Journal of Visual Culture, Television and New Media, Celebrity Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Barbara Creed is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of eight books, including The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993); Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time & Sexual Display In The Cinema (2009); Stray: Human-Animal Ethics in The Anthropocene, (2017); and Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema (2022). Her recent research is in feminist new wave cinema, ethics in the Anthropocene and animal/human studies.

This event is hosted by the Critical Research Association Melbourne (CRAM) and supported by the Screen and Cultural Studies Program, The University of Melbourne.