Skip to content
Martin O'shaughnessy

Professor Martin O'Shaughnessy

Department of Journalism and Media

Staff Group(s)
Journalism and Media

Role

Professor O’Shaughnessy  is an Emeritus Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Journalism and Media.

Before retirement, he was the Research Co-ordinator for the Media and Communications research unit.

Career overview

Professor O'Shaughnessy is a leading specialist on cinema and politics, especially but not only in relation to French film. Topics covered by his work include:

  • European cinema in the current crisis
  • Cinema and the machinic
  • Film and work / film and worker suicide
  • Film, debt and gifts
  • The films of Laurent Cantet
  • The films of Jean Renoir particularly the committed works and the intersection of politics and style.
  • French cinema and colonialism
  • Stardom, genre, masculinities
  • Cinema and precarity
  • Cinema and plasticity

Research areas

Research areas

Professor O'Shaughnessy has supervised or is supervising PhDs on:

  • The Children’s Film Foundation
  • Poetic realism in contemporary British Films
  • British soap operas and alcohol education
  • Beyond the new French extreme cinema
  • Saudi social media as an alternative public sphere
  • The press and democratisation in Iraqi Kurdistan
  • The gueules cassées of World War One and film representation
  • Contemporary French political cinema
  • The work of Spanish cantautores (singer-song writers) in the transition to democracy
  • French film and neoliberal labour
  • Drag cultures in Nottingham
  • Queer temporalities in American Independent cinema

Unfortunately, being retired, he is no longer available to act as a PhD supervisor. For more information on Research Degrees at NTU, visit the Doctoral School.

External activity

  • External examiner for PhDs, MPhils and MRes degrees at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle and at Queen Mary's and Kings (London University)
  • Previously external examiner for French at BA or MA level at De Montfort University, Manchester Metropolitan University, Keele University, Newcastle University and Warwick University.
  • Professor O'Shaughnessy regularly presents films to non-university audiences, both in Nottingham and further afield.

Professor O'Shaughnessy's major collaborations are as follows:

  • Co-organised two international conferences: 'French Cinema and Commitment', Nottingham Trent University, September, 2002 (with Graeme Hayes) and 'La France et la Crise' (annual conference of the ASMCF) in September 2010 (with Chris Reynolds)
  • Co-edited book Cinéma et Engagement, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2005 (with Graeme Hayes)
  • Co-edited number of French Politics, Culture and Society, 23:3, 2005 'French cinema and globalisation' (with Graeme Hayes)
  • Co-edited special number of Modern and Contemporary France, 'La France et la Crise', 20:2, 2012 (with Chris Reynolds)

Professor O'Shaughnessy has also been involved in a range of collaborative projects with colleagues from the USA, France and the UK.

  • Professor O’Shaughnessy  was part of a team of European academics, led by Prof. Ana Manzanas of the University of Salamanca, entitled Hospitality in European Film
  • Professor O'Shaughnessy was awarded one semester or half-year sabbaticals by the AHRC in 2003-4 and in 2012-13. The 2012-13 award was to support the writing of a study of the films of Laurent Cantet.
  • A number of smaller awards for research travel and conference organisation have also been awarded.

Publications

Single authored books:

Looking Beyond Neoliberalism: French and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9781474448642

Laurent Cantet. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. ISBN 9780719091506

La grande illusion. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. ISBN 9781848850576

The new face of political cinema: French film since 1995. Oxford, Berghahn, 2007. ISBN 9781845453220

Jean Renoir. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. ISBN 0719050634

Journal articles:

Malabou's Cineplastics and Contemporary French Film: Jacques Audiard, Céline Sciamma and Mia Hansen-Løve. Film-Philosophy 28:3, 2024, 428-453

Reinventing democracy in Paris and Madrid: Sylvain George’s Benjaminian urban montageFrench Cultural Studies34(1), pp. 106-125. https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221144374

Review essay: Governing by debt by Maurizio Lazzarato and Signs and machines: capitalism and the production of subjectivity by Maurizio Lazzarato. SubStance, 46 (1), 2017. ISSN 0049-2426

Thinking Contemporary Political Cinema with Cantet. South Central Review, 33 (2) 2016, pp. 44-56. ISSN 1549-3377

The crisis before the crisis: reading films by Laurent Cantet and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne through the lens of debt. SubStance, 43 (1) 2014, pp. 82-95.

French film and work: the work done by work centered films. Framework: the Journal of Cinema and Media, 53 (1) 2012, pp. 155-171.

Breaking the circle: 'Le crime de Monsieur Lange' and the contemporary illegibility of the radical text. South Central Review, 28 (3) 2011, pp. 26-44.

Filming work and the work of film. L'Esprit créateur, 3, 2011, pp. 59-73.

French film and the new world of work: from the iron to the glass cage. Modern and Contemporary France, 19 (4) 2011, pp. 427-442.

Book chapters:

Precarious Narratives in French and Francophone Belgian Cinema. In: E. Cuter, G. Kirsten, H. Prenzel eds., Precarity in European Film: Depictions and Discourses, Boston: De Gruyter, 2022, pp. 31-48.  https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110707816-002

Representations: fiction, documentary and the political. In: M. TEMPLE and M. WITT, eds., The French cinema book. (2nd ed.) London: BFI Palgrave, 2018, pp. 297-303. ISBN 9781844574667

Cinema, sex tourism and globalisation in American and European cinema. In: E. MAZIERSKA and L. KRISTENSEN, eds., Contemporary cinema and neoliberal ideology. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018, pp. 217-232. ISBN 9781138235731

Between the I and the we: Jean Renoir’s films of the Popular Front era. In: J. WARDAUGH, ed., Politics and the Individual in France 1930-1950. Oxford: Legenda, 2017, pp. 41-57. ISBN 9781909662247

Contemporary political cinema. In: A. FOX, M. MARIE, R. MOINE and H. RADNER, eds., A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, pp. 117-135. ISBN 9781444338997

Journal special number:

La France et la crise, Modern and Contemporary France, 20:2. Reynolds, C. and O'Shaughnessy, M. eds.

See all of Professor Martin O'Shaughnessy's publications...

Press expertise

Professor O'Shaughnessy can offer comment on the French and other responses to the crisis; contemporary European film; contemporary political cinema; and French cinema.