Dr Nessa Johnston BA (Hons), MA, PhD

Personal Statement

I joined the University of Liverpool in 2022, after previously working at Edge Hill University where I was Senior Lecturer in Media, Film and Television and Associate Director of the Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE). My research and teaching ranges across the field of communication and media, specialising in screen studies.

In 2021-2023 I was Co-Investigator of the Leverhulme funded project "Anonymous Creativity: Library Music in Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s", with Dr Jamie Sexton of Northumbria University (RPG-2020-146). Our resulting book Anonymous Sounds is forthcoming in 2025.
I was a 2020 AHRC-funded Fellow of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, taking up my Fellowship in 2022 with the project "Investigating changing contexts of lower-budget American independent film production in the 1970s” (AHV001396/1).

My research has been published widely in international refereed journals including The Soundtrack; The New Soundtrack; Music, Sound and the Moving Image; Alphaville; The Velvet Light Trap; and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. I also have contributed to numerous high-quality collections including The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema, The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (Oxford University Press), and Integrated Soundtracks (Palgrave); and I have a chapter forthcoming in Global Cult Cinema: De-Colonizing Cult Film Studies (Bloomsbury).

My research monograph, The Commitments: Youth, Music and Authenticity in 1990s Ireland, was published in 2022 as part of the Routledge Cinema and Youth Cultures series. The book draws upon in-depth interviews I conducted with key creative personnel including author Roddy Doyle, and archival research in the UK and Ireland.

I have over a decade’s experience teaching at HE level in England and Scotland and am external examiner at UCC and Glasgow School of Art.