People

FM Research Group Members

If you’d like to contact individual group members to discuss PhD supervision, media appearances, or other research questions, you can find their contact details by following the link to their Open University profile.

For general inquiries about the research group, please contact Dr Rebecca Harrison and Dr Mark Fryers.

Professor Paul Anand

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

Dr Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon

Lee-Jane is an independent filmmaker and academic, currently working as a Senior Lecturer at The Open University and developing new curriculum in Film and Media as part of a team in the School of Creative Industries.

Dr Jenny Chamarette

Jenny is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media. Jenny was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin’s Personal Cinema. Jenny has published widely on phenomenology and complex embodiment, the intersections of disability and gender/sexuality, and intercultural moving. Jenny is also a writer, curator and artist. Extracts from Jenny’s creative non-fiction book, Q is for Garden were shortlisted for international writing prizes.

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 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 Rebecca Harrison

Rebecca is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media with a background in curation and ongoing experience as a film journalist. My academic research explores political economies of screen media, with especial interest in technological and ecological histories of film. Across all my work, I’m interested in how gender, race, class, disability and sexuality underpin people’s encounters with the UK’s screen and other industries.

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 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.