Research
Yannis's research focuses on six main areas:
• American independent cinema
• Hollywood studios and global entertainment
• The Greek screen industries
• Cinema and youth cultures
• The B film as a platform for creative filmmaking
• Screen industries and Sport
His publications include 6 monographs, all focusing on aspects of American independent film, with his book American Independent Cinema (2006; second edition 2017) having been a key work in the field. They also include 7 collections, the focus of which ranges from Greek cinema to American independent cinema; from the relationship between cinema and politics to new understandings of the Hollywood Renaissance; from the film Dirty Dancing and its impact on popular culture to the history of Hollywood major United Artists to the ways in which concepts of media independence are now associated with discourses surrounding television.
These books have been published with leading publishers, including: Routledge, Edinburgh University Press, Wayne State University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, University of Chicago Press and Palgrave.
Yannis' work has also appeared in a number of key journals, including: Media Industries, Screen, Velvet Light Trap, Film History, Studies in Documentary Film, New Review of Film and Television StudiesInternational Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, and Revue Francais D'Etudes Americaines.
His work has also appeared in numerous edited collections focusing on the work of filmmakers such as John Sayles, David Mamet, Steven Soderbergh, Edgar G. Ulmer, Joseph H. Lewis, Jacques Tourneur, Spike Jonze, John Hughes, Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola, companies such as Orion Pictures and USA Films, and on topics ranging from Hollywood and media convergence to the ways in which independent film travels outside the US; from how Greek Americans are represented in US film to how Hollywood productions shot on location in Greece have impacted the Greek film industry.
Yannis has also been co-editor of 4 book series:American Indies (Edinburgh University Press, 2009-12) has published 5 volumes on key US independent films, such as Lost in Translation and Memento. Cinema and Youth Cultures (Routledge, 2017-) has published 30 volumes on well-known youth films such as Clueless, Grease, Boyhood, The Virgin Suicides, The Hunger Games. Routledge Hollywood CentenaryTHE ROUTLEDGE (Routledge, 2018-) has published 3 volumes on MGM, Fox and United Artists.International Screen Industries (Bloomsbury/BFI, 2024-) Yannis has taken on this role after the founding editors of the series stepped down
Yannis is on the advisory boards of Media Industries and Transnational Screens. Between 2014 and 2020 he was on the editorial board of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture and between 2002 and 2017 he was on the advisory board of the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Since 2020 he has also been on the editorial board of Liverpool University Press.
He has organised and hosted numerous conferences and symposia, while for a 10 year period (2010-2019) he was co-organiser and co-host of the Liverpool Film Seminar, which hosted over 80 leading scholar disseminating research in the field of film studies.
Yannis’s current projects include the monograph, WHEN HOLLYWOOD CAME TO GREECE, 1957-1967 (Routledge, 2025) and the co-authored PARAMOUNT (Routledge, 2026).
Yannis can offer PhD supervision on all areas of his research interests, especially American independent cinema, contemporary Hollywood and entertainment industry studies, the Greek screen industries and screen industries and sport. He is currently supervises PhDs on American independent cinema and the AIDS focused films of the 1980s, and on US cable channel HBO and its film programming in the 1980s and 1990s.
.jpg)
American Independent Cinema
Most of Yannis's work has focused on American independent cinema, especially its relationship to Hollywood. His book American Independent Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2006; 2nd edition, 2017) was foundational in establishing the field of independent film studies as it adopted a historical perspective and provided one of the first scholarly accounts of the ways in which independence has been practised both away from the Hollywood studios and in close proximity to them.
Yannis then co-edited the American Indies book series (Edinburgh UP 2009-2012), which took key contemporary independent films and questioned the ways they relate to notions of independence, industrially and aesthetically. As part of the series, Yannis authored The Spanish Prisoner (2009), a 1998 film by David Mamet that was financed and released by Hollywood specialty film subsidiary, Sony Pictures Classics, but which adopted an anti-Hollywood aesthetic that made it sit firmly outside the mainstream, despite its link with that.
Yannis then moved to a project that examined the main Hollywood specialty film divisions (Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, Paramount Classics, Fine Line Features, and others), focusing on the ways they operated in the independent film sector and the types of films they made and released. Hollywood's Indies: Classics Divisions, Specialty Labels and the American Film Market (Edinburgh UP, 2012) also prompted Yannis to move to more conceptual questions relating to the label 'independent', which were elaborated further in the book American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond (Routledge, 2013) he co-edited with Geoff King and Claire Molloy.
He then moved to more focused issues in the field, exploring how independent film exists within industrial developments prompted by media convergence; how independent films circulate around the globe given that most of the companies that produce and distribute them are US-based; how documentary films fit in definitions of independent cinema that tend to prioritise feature length narrative films; how the arrival of digital technology started to polarise independence between 'indiewood' and 'nowherewood' and how scholarly work on film independence emerged and evolved over the course of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st century.
More recently he collaborated with Cynthia Baron in Acting Indie: Industry, Aesthetics, and Performance (Palgrave, 2020), a project that looked at how the evolution of independent cinema in the US can be understood through the actors' contributions, both in terms of performance and in terms of the ways they influence the production and marketing of independent films.
That project generated additional collaboration with Cynthia Baron, looking at Sofia Coppola as an independent filmmaker and the extent to which the actors' performances in her films are an integral component of the films' aesthetics, as well as at amateur performance in independent film, with the legendary Salt of the Earth as a focal point.
Yannis also worked on questions of independence and how it is articulated in the work of filmmakers such as John Sayles, Spike Jonze, Steven Soderbergh John Hughes, Robert Altman and David Mamet, through chapter contributions to edited collections with a focus on these filmmakers.
His most recent work includes an article published in the Media Industries journal that looks at the distribution of indiewood films following the closure of most of Hollywood studio specialty film divisions, the emergence of new companies that took their place and the rapid rise of streaming services, while his co-edited collection Indie TV: Industry, Aesthetics and Medium Specificity (Routledge, 2023), broke new ground by becoming the first sustained study of how discourses of independence have been moving to television in the context of an increasing media convergence that also sees the exchange of filmmakers and talent between the two media.
Hollywood Studios and Global Entertainment
With so much of Yannis's work examining the relationship of independent film to Hollywood cinema, it was not surprising that he also developed a strong research interest in the Hollywood studios and their practices. His co-edited collection The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era (Bloomsbury, 2018) was a significant project that examined one of the best known eras in the history of Hollywood when the studios endorsed a more daring cinema.
Not adopting the usual auteurist approaches of other work in the field, The Hollywood Renaissance threw the spotlight onto the contribution of other practitioners (producers, actors, editors, cinematographers) while also challenging established accounts that had downplayed the power of the studios during that era.
Yannis then moved to a very ambitious long-term project under the title the Routledge Hollywood Centenary, which aimed to revisit (and revise) the histories of the 8 major Hollywood studios (Paramount, MGM, Universal, Columbia, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, Disney and United Artists) as they all now count over 100 years of presence in the field. The individual studio projects are led by world-leading scholars who had also written on the studios in the past and who have been invited to also revisit and update their work.
The Centenary project also focuses on important historiographical questions, especially as the studios have been for decades divisions of major conglomerates and therefore part of larger histories that involve other media and sectors. The project has already seen publications on MGM (2018), Twentieth Century Fox (2020) and United Artists (2020), with the other volumes to follow.
Yannis is involved as co-author (with Douglas Gomery and Clara-Pafort Overduin) in the volume on PARAMOUNT, with his work focusing primarily on the company's years as a division of various parent companies.
The Greek Screen Industries
Yannis's work on the Greek screen industries can be traced in two small projects looking at the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) and the ways in which as an independent film represented Greek people and his joining a group of Greek media scholars who co-founded and launched the Journal of Greek Media and Culture (2014-).
As a member of the journal's editorial board (2014-20), Yannis oversaw the publication of several volumes, including a special issue on the Greek Screen Industries, which he co-edited with Lydia Papadimitriou and Georgia Aitaki. The issue featured an introduction by the editors which became the first comprehensive overview of the development of screen industries research in Greece, shifting the focus away from information and the news into film, television and entertainment.
The three authors-editors extended this work as part of a chapter they published in the Routledge Companion to Media Industries (Routledge, 2022), while in an earlier issue of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture Yannis, Lydia Papadimitriou and Vangelis Calotychos interviewed acclaimed Greek filmmaker Athena Rachel Tsangari, with a focus on her practices and the industrial environment within which she operated.
Yannis's other major focal point in this area marries his long standing interest in the Hollywood studios with his newer work on the Greek screen industries, through a major project under the title WHEN HOLLYWOOD CAME TO GREECE, 1957-1967. Supported by national Greek institutions, the project examines 16 Hollywood 'runaway' productions shot on location in Greece by the major studios during a period when Greece was entering modernity and its film industry was still organised in artisanal ways. Besides asking how these films interacted with the Greek film industry and the country's political and cultural institutions, the project also seeks to understand how these films constitute part of Greece's audio-visual and, more broadly, cultural heritage. A monograph based on the research on this project will be published by Routledge in 2025.
Research groups
Research collaborations
Professor Douglas Gomery, Dr Clara Pafort-Overduin
Hollywood Centenary: Paramount
University of Maryland, Utrecht University
Professor Douglas Gomery, Dr Clara Pafort-Overduin and I are co-authoring a book on the history of Paramount under the ROUTLEDE HOLLYWOOD CENTENARY book series that I also co-edit. The volume will provide a rigorous and often revisionist account of the history of one of Hollywood's best known studios, using new archival resources and methods under the banners of New Film History and Media Industry Studies. Contracted with Routledge, it is expected to be published in 2026.
Professor Alisa Perren
International Screen Industries
University of Texas at Austin
In 2024 Professor Alisa Perren and I became the new co-editors of the INTERNATIONAL SCREEN INDUSTRIES book series (BFI/Bloomsbury). Under the leadership of founding editors Professor Paul McDonald and Professor Michael Curtin, the series had been a major contributor to the visibility and success of media industries research having published 18 volumes since 2007. As the founding editors stepped down, Professor Perren and I have taken over editing the series.
Dr Sian Lincoln
Rock Around the Clock: Exploitation, Rock 'n' Roll and the Origins of Youth Culture
Independent Scholar
Dr Sian Lincoln and I co-authored a monograph that examines the dissemination of rock 'n' roll music through the film ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK (1956), a low-budget, 'exploitation' film that was made at the margins of the Hollywood film industry but which resonated with youth audiences and their culture at the time. The book was published by Routledge and came out in 2024.
Dr James Lyons
Indie TV: Industry, Aesthetics and Medium Specificity
University of Exeter
Dr Lyons and I co-edited a volume on the intersection between film and television in the US as media convergence have brought them increasingly close to the extent that filmmakers and actors once associated with independent cinema have now been working increasingly on television. Bringing with them practices, techniques but also modes of organising production and branding, the volume examines the extent to which terms such as 'independent' and 'indie' can apply to television. Under the title, INDIE TV: INDUSTRY, AESTHETICS AND MEDIUM SPECIFICITY, the book was published by Routledge in 2023.
Professor Cynthia Baron
Sofia Coppola, Indiewood, and Performance
Bowling Green State University
An extension of our earlier work ACTING INDIE: INDUSTRY, AESTHETICS AND PERFORMANCE (2020), 'SOFIA COPPOLA, INDIEWOOD AND PERFORMANCE' takes the model of understanding independent cinema through actors' contributions and applies it to the case of Sofia Coppola, arguing that the aesthetics of her work is integrally linked to the performance of the actors cast in its films. The collaboration took the form of a chapter that was published in THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO SOFIA COPPOLA that was published in 2023.
Dr Lydia Papadimitriou, Dr Georgia Aitaki
Locating and Localising Media Industry Studies: The Case of Greece
Liverpool John Moores University, Karlstad University
An extension of our earlier work 'THE GREEK SCREEN INDUSTRIES:FROM POLITICAL ECONOMY TO MEDIA INDUSTRY STUDIES', 'LOCATING AND LOCALISING MEDIA INDUSTRY STUDIES: THE CASE OF GREECE' looks specifically at how a new research paradigm about media industries research under the title 'Media Industry Studies' (MIS) has been applied to work that has taken place in Greece and how it can extended in future research in the field. The collaboration took the form of a chapter that was published in THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIA INDUSTRIES that was published in 2022.
Lydia Papadimitriou, Georgia Aitaki
The Greek Screen Industries - Special Issue of The Journal of Greek Media and Culture
Liverpool John Moores University, Karlstad University
Dr Papadimitriou, Dr Aitaki and I co-edited a special issue of the JOURNAL OF GREEK MEDIA AND CULTURE (Vol. 6, No. 1) focusing on the Greek Screen Industries. We also co-authored an introductory article to the issue under the title, 'GREEK SCREEN INDUSTRIES: FROM POLITICAL ECONOMY TO MEDIA INDUSTRY STUDIES', which became the first work to look at the ways in which work in the field developed and the extent to which political economic perspectives focused overwhelmingly in the information industries rather than the entertainment one. The issue and our article came out in 2020.
Professor Cynthia Baron
Acting Indie: Industry, Aesthetics, and Performance
Bowling Green State University
Professor Baron and I co-authored a book on the role actors played in the shaping and evolution of American independent cinema, both as performers and as practitioners whose marketability and stardom has helped produce and market films. Under the title ACTING INDIE: INDUSTRY, AESTHETICS AND PERFORMANCE, the book was published by Palgrave in 2020.
Mr Peter Krämer, Professor Tino Balio, Mr Gary Needham
United Artists
De Montfort University, University of Wisconsin-Madison
We co-edited a volume that examined the centennial history of United Artists, one of the most successful Hollywood companies. The collection invited scholars and other practitioners (such as the US Library of Congress film archivist) to examine particular moments in the company's history, with a view to highlighting the diverse ways in which it has operated over the course of a century. The book is part of the ROUTLEDGE HOLLYWOOD CENTENARY series, which I also co-edit. It was published by Routledge in 2020.
Mr Peter Krämer
The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era
De Montfort University
We co-edited together a book that revisited the films of the so-called Hollywood Renaissance (1967-1974) with a view to examining them from new perspectives that do not prioritise the role of their directors but focus instead on other practitioners (editors, producers, cinematographers, actors) and the industrial context with which they were produced. THE HOLLYWOOD RENAISSANCE: REVISITING AMERICAN CINEMA'S MOST CELEBRATED ERA was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018
Professor Claire Molloy
Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics
Edge Hill University
Professor Molloy and I co-edited a collection under the auspices of the Routledge Companion format on the various dimensions that the relationship between cinema and politics has taken historically and contemporaneously. 40 scholars with expertise in the field contributed work under themes including: Approaches, Activism, Propaganda, Mobility, Hollywood, Independence, Cinegeographies and Documentary. The result was the collection the ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO CINEMA AND POLITICS, published in 2016.
Dr Sian Lincoln
The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture
Independent Scholar (at the time Liverpool John Moores University)
Dr Lincoln and I co-edited a volume on the impact of the film DIRTY DANCING (1987) on popular culture. The project benefited from contributions by scholars and researchers from various disciplines (film studies, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, theatre studies, dance studies, media industry studies) as they researched the ways in which a low budget independent film has become one of the staples of contemporary popular culture. Under the title THE TIME OF OUR LIVES: DIRTY DANCING AND POPULAR CULTURE, the book was published by Wayne State University Press in 2013.
Dr Lydia Papadimitriou
Liverpool Film Seminar
Liverpool John Moores University
Between 2010 and 2019 I co-organise and co-hosted the LIVERPOOL FILM SEMINAR, a major platform for the dissemination of research in film studies in the Merseyside region. As part of the seminar which took place in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University, we welcomed over 80 major scholars in the field, fostering exchange of ideas, networking and the development of research environment.
Mr Gary Needham
American Indies
Nottingham Trent University (currently at the University of Liverpool)
I co-founded and co-edited this book series with Gary Needham (then at Nottingham Trent University) for Edinburgh University Press, with a view to soliciting projects in key independent films and examine the ways in which independence manifests (aesthetically, industrially, politically, etc.). AMERICAN INDIES had 5 volumes published between 2009 and 2013.
Dr Lydia Papadimitriou
Greek Representation in Indie Film 1
Liverpool John Moores Univesity
In 2015 Dr Lydia Papadimitriou and I started working on a project that examined the representation on Greek people in US cinema, with the smash hit MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING (2002) as a focal point, a film that placed Greek immigrants at the centre of a narrative for the first time in decades and proved to be a global box office hit. Our collaboration took the shape of a book chapter under the title ''MY BIG FAT LIFE IN RUINS': MARKETING GREEKNESS AND CONTEMPORARY US INDEPENDENT FILM' and was published in the BFI collection FILM MARKETING IN THE 21ST CENTURY in 2015.
Mr Gary Needham
The Routledge Hollywood Centenary
A project that looks back at the histories of the Hollywood major studios and their transformation from US film companies to subsidiaries of global entertainment conglomerates to mark their centenary. World-leading scholars with specialisation in Hollywood cinema and media industries have undertaken research on each of these studios (Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros., MGM, United Artists, Columbia, Disney and Fox) with that research leading into 8 volumes, one on each studio. The volumes will come out as part of the ROUTLEDGE HOLLYWOOD CENTENARY book series (2018-2027) which is the main focal point of the collaboration.
Professor Claire Molloy, Professor Geoff King
American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond
Edge Hill University, Brunel University
Professor Molloy, Professor King and I co-edited a book on American independent cinema at a time when its relationship with the Hollywood mainstream had become increasingly visible, giving rise to terms such as indie and indiewood. Together with my collaborators we invited scholars with key expertise in the field to examine aspects of this multifaceted phenomenon. The outcome was AMERICAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA: INDIE, INDIEWOOD AND BEYOND that was published by Routledge in 2013.
Dr Sian Lincoln
Cinema and Youth Cultures
Independent Scholar
A long term project that aims to examine key films from around the world that have represented youth with a view to examining the ways in which these films have portrayed young people and their cultures, the ways they 'spoke' to them as target audiences and encouraged them to engage with them and the ways they were produced and disseminated by various film industries that tend to rely increasingly in youth audiences for their survival. Under the title CINEMA AND YOUTH CULTURES, this collaboration took the shape of a book series contracted with Routledge. Since 2017 and until 2024 it has published 30 volumes.
Dr Lydia Papadimitriou
Greek Representation in Indie Film 2
Liverpool John Moores University
The second output of this collaboration was another co-authored chapter, under the title: 'HAVING ITS CAKE AND EATING IT TOO: CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN INDIE CINEMA AND 'MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING' REFRAMED'. The chapter was published in the collection INDIE REFRAMED: WOMEN'S FILMMAKING AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA by Edinburgh University Press in 2016.
Dr Lydia Papadimitriou
Greek Cinema: Texts, Histories, Identities
Liverpool John Moores University
Dr Papadimitriou and I co-edited a collection on Greek Cinema following a successful conference on the subject I co-organised with my collaborator, Dr Lydia Papadimitriou in 2008. At the time there was very little research on Greek cinema published in English, so the volume GREEK CINEMA: TEXTS, HISTORIES, IDENTITIES became a touchstone for further work in the field, which blossomed in the following decade. The volume was published by Intellect in the UK and the University of Chicago Press in the US in 2012.