Jules O’Dwyer works on contemporary French cinema, film theory, and queer studies. He completed his PhD at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and took up his current appointment as Research Fellow at St John’s College in 2020. Jules’s published work has looked at a range of theoretical paradigms—including object-oriented thought, apparatus theory, and questions of intertextuality and stardom—through the lens of French film, ranging from 1950s ethnographic film to recent queer cinema. He is currently working on two books: a monograph on spatiality and sexual cultures in French cinema, titled The Seduction of Space (under contract, University of Minnesota Press), and a shorter book that considers cinema’s enduring fascination with the space of the hotel.
His next project will expand his long-standing interest in cinematic space in new directions. In ‘Curatorial cinema’, Jules plans to explore how Francophone filmmakers and theorists have thought about, and sought to politicize, the porous boundaries between the cinema, the museum and the art gallery in order to negotiate questions of cultural difference. An early prize-winning essay pertaining to this project was published in Screen in 2017.
Jules contributes to undergraduate teaching in French and film studies and convenes his own MPhil unit, ‘Spaces of Queer Cinema’. He is also a co-editor of World Picture, an online journal of critical theory and visual culture.
Publications:
‘From the Story of an Eye to Corporeal Cinema’ in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, ed. Todd Reeser (London; New York: Routledge, 2022): 237-246
‘Enduring extremity: on Isabelle Huppert’s intertextual body’ in Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship, eds. Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021): 79-98.
‘Coming and going: Nolot, Barthes and the Porn Theatre’, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 42:3 (Fall 2020): 259-280.
‘The Legacy of the New Wave in French cinema’ by Douglas Morrey [review], Studies in European Cinema, 19:2 (2019): 440:443.
‘Reframing the spaces of French cinema’, Studies in French Cinema, 19:2 (2019): 165-169.
‘The cinematic Rorschach: on signs and stains in Michaux and Brakhage’ in Stains | Les Taches: Communication and Contamination in French Culture, eds. Zoe Angelis and Blake Gutt (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019): 69-84.
‘Le Double: Littérature, Arts, Cinéma, Nouvelles approches’ ed by Erica Durante and Amaury Dehoux [review], French Studies, 73:4 (October 2019): 663.
‘Histoire(s) de l’art: the queer curation of Vincent Dieutre’, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 16 (Winter 2018): 53-66.
‘Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema’ by Katharina Lindner [review], Film-Philosophy, 22:3 (October 2018): 510-513.
‘Reorienting objects in Marker and Resnais’s Les Statues meurent aussi’, Screen, 58:4 (Winter 2017): 497- 507.
