People

Dr James Blake

Video-based and visual disinformation and its impact on the global broadcast news agenda. Social media and online harm; audience agency, immersion and interaction. Documentary film outputs around user participation.

Matthew Holley

Matthew is the Technical Lead for SCI. He has extensive knowledge of programme making within the OU having been a Producer within LDS V&A for a significant time and, prior to that, part of the BBC’s presence at the OU Production Centre at Walton Hall.

Having started in the Film Unit at the BBC in 1989, there’s not much video and audio kit he hasn’t used or read the manual for. Whilst not having his own research brief he is happy to offer technical and programme making help and assistance to colleagues who may require it.

Professor Paul Anand

Paul is a Professor of Economics and Philosophy and has a Master's degree in Photography. He has wide-ranging interests which include the use of the arts, media and digital case-studies in the teaching of economics.

Dr Francesca Benatti

Francesca Benatti is Senior Research Fellow in Digital Humanities. She is based in the English and Creative Writing department, where she researches digital humanities, book history and comics. She is particularly interested in webcomics – comics published entirely online – and how digital technologies are changing reading and publishing. She has written on comics, book history and hypertext, including her recent book Innovations in Digital Comics (Cambridge Elements, 2024).

Dr Amy Charlesworth

Amy works on artists film and video with a particular interest in documentary modalities in feminist moving-image histories in the UK and US during the women’s liberation movements. Her book chapter: ‘Reverberations for Realism: or Feminist Documentary Strategies in British Film and Video Art 1979-1992’ in After Critical Realism is forthcoming (Brill, 2025) and examines the legacies of two UK feminist film distributors formed in 1979.

Dr Elayne Chaplin

Elayne is a Staff Tutor in the History Department, with an academic background in film/media history. Current research interests are focused on representations of gender, criminality and victimhood, with a recent publication examining the evolution of Yakuza masculinity in Japanese cinema (from the silent era to the twenty-first century), and an upcoming chapter in an edited collection on true crime.

Dr Emily Coleman

Emily specialises in Cultural industries and creative labour; media participation and duty of care; documentary filmmaking and theory; cultural policy and production practices.

Dr Mark Fryers

Mark is a Lecturer in Film and Media. He has published widely on film, television and cultural history and specialises in the intersection of maritime spaces and media, youth horror culture and British film and television. His forthcoming publications include a monograph on The Woman in Black (1989) and an edited collection on cybernetics in science fiction.

Dr Kaya Davies Hayon

Kaya is a Lecturer in Film & Media at the Open University. Her research examines the intersections of gender, ethnicity and sexuality in contemporary Arab film and visual cultures. Recent publications focus on transnational Arab stardom and Amazigh women’s participatory photography.

Dr Bethan Michael-Fox

Dr Bethan Michael-Fox, FRSA, SFHEA works in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the Open University in the School of English and Creative Writing. Her work focuses on how cultural representations intersect with lived experience, with a particular emphasis on the representation of death and the dead. She is also involved in research projects focused on representations of students, universities and academics on screen.

Dr James Mahon

Dr James Mahon is a staff tutor at the Open University and his post-doctoral work explores media pedagogy, digital media trends and practice-based outputs. He has worked for regional and national broadcasters as a TV reporter, presenter and journalist since 2006. More recently, Mahon has won more than a dozen awards as a mobile documentary film maker and podcaster exploring issues including gender, culture and technology.

Dan Twist

Dan Twist specialises in Television, Radio and Podcast Production, practice-based pedagogy and practice informed research, British television, American television, Multiplatform and Digital Content, Global Formats and media and cultural theory.

Dr Ben Winters

Ben is Senior Lecturer in Music. His main area of research expertise is on Hollywood film music of the studio era, and the film scores of Erich Korngold, though he has also published on issues pertaining to music’s narrative source as found in all forms of screen media.