American Film (especially in the history and theory of Hollywood cinema)

African American Culture and History (especially the relationship between popular culture and race)

Censorship and Mass Media

European Exiles and Hollywood

American Popular Culture/ Theories of Popular Culture

I currently teach in the following areas:

Undergraduate:

• convene and deliver all lecture/seminars for a course on Hollywood cinema: The Cultural History of American Film
• convene and deliver all lecture/seminars for a course on African American Popular Culture--with a focus on commercial film, popular music, sport and popular fiction since 1900
• convene and team teach on Film Theory

Postgraduate:

• Convene and team teach MA option, Apocalypse Then: New Hollywood Cinema
• Team teach MA option, Cinema and History

Career details

• PhD in American Studies, University of Minnesota (1995)
• Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and American Studies, LICA (Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts), Lancaster University, UK (employee of Lancaster University since 1995)
• Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University (2010-2013)
• Member RAE2008 Main Panel L: Sub-Panel 47--American Studies and Anglophone Area Studies (2005-2008)

His research interests are:

• The cultural history of American cinema
• African-American popular culture
• Race, ethnicity and criminal identity politics in America
• Theories of popular culture.

Current research project:

Currently completing research for a biography of the African American writer, actor, and political activist, Julian Mayfield (1928-1984)--provisional title: "Which Way Does the Blood Red River Run: Julian Mayfield and the Politics of Oblivion". This project has been supported by a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. Details of this project can be found on my Harvard University webpage: http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/jonathan-munby

The project potentially involves editing a companion anthology of Julian Mayfield's writing--his critical journalism, academic essays and his out-of-print and unpublished fiction and plays.

Publications include:

Books (single-authored monographs):

Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African-American Popular Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 224 pp http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo11396510.html

Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 263 pp

Most recent journal articles and chapter contributions

Articles:

"Signifyin' Cinema: Rudy Ray Moore and the Quality of Badness", Journal for Cultural Research Vol.11, No.3 (July 2007): 203-219

Chapters in anthologies:

"Baad Cinema: The Gangsta/ Gangster Connection in African American Cinema," in Public Enemies: Film zwischen Idenititaetsbildung und Kontrolle ed. Winfried Pauleit, Christine Rueffert, und Karl-Heinz Schmid (Berlin: Bertz-Fischer, 2011), 37-50 http://www.bertz-fischer.de/product_info.php?products_id=345

"Gangs and Mobs", in A Companion to Crime Fiction, ed.Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 210-221

"From Gangsta to Gangster: The Hood Film's Criminal Allegiance with Hollywood", in The New Film History: Sources,Methods,Approaches,ed.James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 166-179

"The Underworld Films of Oscar Micheaux and Ralph Cooper: Towards a Genealogy of the Black Screen Gangster", inMob Culture: Essays in the American Gangster Film, ed. Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 261-280

"The 'No' to the Great American 'Yes': Hollywood's Criminal Representation of Organised Crime, 1929-1951", in Crime and Hollywood Incorporated, ed. Françoise Clary and John Dean(Rouen, France: Publications de l'Université de Rouen, 2003), 179-202

"How it Feels" (co-authored) in Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material, ed. Jane Arthurs and Iain Grant(Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003)