I was lucky enough to receive a full bursary from Brunel University last year to do a PhD. This was awesome because there was no way I could ever afford to do one on my own. The downside was that I'm supposed to be doing it full time, but the funding only covers the fees. And I am not exactly well off. So the result of this is that I'm working four days a week teaching media to college students who couldn't care less, whilst trying to do my PhD work at home and on the bus. Not exactly ideal, but until anything better comes along, it's kind of working.
I got to know Brunel uni through the Cine Excess festival. I gave two papers, one in 2010 and one in 2011. You can find one of them on my old blog here. My other paper was on the sexploitation films of Norman J. Warren, and I'm very slowly working on a book about him. But that's another story.
As a result of those papers I was invited to give a lecture on the Brunel Cult Film MA back in November 2011 on British sleaze of the seventies. It was so nice to do that, after spending most of my teaching time working with sixteen-year olds with attitudes.
So I like to think that doing that lecture helped them to remember me when I applied for the PhD just a few months later. And here I am, nearly a year in. I've mostly been reading and figuring out what I'm going to do. I have to submit my first 10,000 word chapter by the end of next month.
At some point I'll do a post on how Bonditis inspired the direction I'm going in. For now, here's a poster.
I had to create a poster to illustrate my research intentions for a conference at Brunel back in April. I thought I would share it here, as it summarises my research fairly well. Hopefully. That was the point after all.
I realised once I had printed it on to A3 that the text at the bottom was too small, and I'd wasted a lot of space up at the top. At the conference I was put between posters about research in The Oman and Saudi Arabia, and I felt a touch self-conscious about my choice of central image. It's taken from publicity material for a German Bond-spoof called Bonditis. I will probably post about that film here at some point soon.
So here's the poster. If you click on the link you can view it bigger on Flickr so you can zoom in on the tiny text.
