Professor Melvyn Stokes

Melvyn Stokes is Professor of Film History, and director of the AHRC-funded Remembering British Cinema-going of the 1960s project. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Princeton, a Fulbright Exchange Professor at Mount Holyoke College, and a Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Melvyn is particularly interested in the study of movie audiences and has now organised two large conferences and co-edited five books on the subject. He is also interested in the intellectual, political and cultural aspects of Progressivism.

PhD supervision

Melvyn is interested in receiving PhD proposals from applicants working on the history of American cinema, the history of cinema reception and audiences, and general American cultural history.

He is currently supervising the work of Juno Sun, who is writing on the representation of Chinese people in Hollywood cinema during the 20th century.

Major publications

• Melvyn Stokes and Paul McEwan, eds., In the Shadow of "The Birth of a Nation": Racism, Reception and Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). 
• Melvyn Stokes, Matthew Jones and Emma Pett, Cinema Memories: A People's History of Cinema-going in 1960s Britain (British Film Institute/Bloomsbury, 2022)
• American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s (Bloomsbury: London, 2013)
• 'Chaplin's "Modern Times" (1936) and the Great Depression: The reception of the film in the US, Britain and France', in Hollywood and the Great Depression: American Film, Politics, and Society in the 1930s, edited by I. Morgan and P. Davies (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2016), pp. 239-256.
• 'Audiences in Cinema History', in Approaches to Film and Reception Theories (PU Blaise Pascal: Clermont-Ferrand, 2012), pp. 11-30.

For a full list of publications, see Melvyn's Iris profile.

Grants/projects

• Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s, AHRC, 2013-2015
• Remembering 1960s British Cinema-going, AHRC, 2017-2018

Teaching

• American Cinema History (advanced seminar for second- and third-year undergraduates)
• American History on Film (MA course)
• Hollywood Genres (MA course)