Professor Ann Gray, BA, MA (Leeds) DPhil (York)

Position:
Professor of Cultural Studies
Faculty Research Director 
Director 'Television History 1995-2010'
Co-director Centre for European Cultural Studies

Departmental Responsibilities:
Programme Leader for MA Media & Cultural Studies

Teaching:
Ann teaches critical theories of media and culture, critical research methods and television studies on the MA Media & Cultural Studies. She also delivers lectures on gender, technology and audience studies on the undergraduate programme in Media Production. She has also contributed to the MA Historical Studies on topics relating to ‘public history’.

Research:
Ann’s main research interests are in media and popular culture but she has focussed more recently on television studies in particular. Her first book Video Playtime: the gendering of a leisure technology was a study of the uses of the video cassette recorder, relating this to an understanding of media use in everyday life with particular reference to gender. In addition to writing on aspects of gender, feminist cultural studies and audience studies she has also written about the intellectual and institutional politics of research methods most particularly in her book Research Practice for Cultural Studies. Ann has a strong interest in the history of cultural studies, having worked for a number of years at the Department of Cultural Studies in Birmingham. In 1993, with Jim McGuigan, she edited Studying Culture : an introductory reader and in 1996 with Helen Baehr Turning it On : a reader in women and media  and she is currently editing a two volume collection of the original CCCS Working Papers in cultural studies. In 2005 Ann, working with her colleague, Dr Jirina Smejkalova secured a British Academy grant for their project ‘Re-thinking Cultural Studies in the New Europe’ (link) which has established a European network of cultural researchers who are bringing different intellectual histories and perspectives to cultural studies.

Ann’s main research focus is now on how television represents the past for which she secured a substantial AHRC grant for the four year project ‘Televising History – 1995-2010’.(link) She works with Dr Erin Bell, Research Fellow and two PhD students, Sarah Moody and Barbara Sadler.  

Ann is Editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies   and she was a founder member of the international Association of Cultural Studies. She sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of British Film and Television and Memory Studies. She was a founder member of the Midlands Television Research Group at the University of Warwick.

Ann currently supervises two PhD students as part of the ‘Televising History’ project and welcomes proposals for research topics in any of the above areas.

Key publications:
'History on Television: charisma, narrative and knowledge' (with Erin Bell) European Journal of Cultural Studies 10.1.2007

Research Practice for Cultural Studies: ethnographic methods and lived cultures (2003) London, Sage

'Cultural Studies at Birmingham: the impossibility of critical pedgogy?' for a special issue of Cultural Studies 2003

Enterprising Femininity: new modes of work and subjectivities' European Journal of Cultural Studies Vol 6.4: November 2003

'The "Cultural Politics" of Television in he Home' in Miller, T. (ed) Television Studies BF1 2002

Audience and Reception Research in Retrospect: the trouble with audiences' for Pertti Alasuutari, Rethinking the Media Audience, Sage, March 1999

'Learning from Experience: Feminist Methodology and Cultural Studies' in Cultural Methodologies, Jim McGuigan (ed) Sage, 1997

'I want to tell you a story: the narratives in Video Playtime'. The Production of Feminist Cultural Theory (ed) Beverley Skeggs, Manchester University Press, 1995

Video Playtime: the gendering of a leisure technology (1992), London Routledge

'Reading the Audience' in Screen 18(3) 1987 pp.24-36

'Behind Closed Doors: women and video' in Baehr, H and Dyer, G.

Boxed in: Women on and in Television, Pandora: 1987