Dr Maria Flood PhD

Personal Statement

I joined Liverpool as a Lecturer in World Cinema in 2021 and became Senior Lecturer in 2022. I studied at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge, and taught in ENS Lyon before being awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. I was at Keele University from 2016-2021, where I was Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for Film Studies. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

I am a specialist of world cinema and political violence, and I have published widely on French and Algerian cinemas of conflict, including my 2018 monograph, 'France, Algeria, and the Moving Image: Screening Histories of Violence'. This work recognises the ongoing transnational connections between French and Algerian history and focuses on key historical events: the 17 October 1961 massacre, torture and the treatment of women during the Algerian War, and terrorism in Algeria in the 1990s.

More broadly, I am interested in questions of ethics, gender and spectatorship, and I have published on cinema and torture in Franco-Algerian war, colonial and postcolonial cinema, terrorism and affect, and gender, violence, and extremism. My current project looks at the figure of the terrorist in world cinema, and examines the role of emotion in documentary and fiction films that feature face-to-face encounters with extremists. I have also published a student-facing monograph on the 2016 film ‘Moonlight’.

I would be happy to supervise students interested in any of the following research areas: World Cinema; Cinema and Politics; Film Violence and Extremism; Transnational and Postcolonial Cinemas; Gender, Race and Sexuality; Vulnerability, Childhood and Youth Narratives; Conflict, Ethics and Spectatorship; Photography & Documentary Cinema.