Dr Michael N Goddard

Michael researches film, contemporary television, popular music, digital screen cultures and their multiple relations

Staff details

Dr Michael N Goddard

Position

Reader in Film and Screen Media

Department

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Email

Michael.Goddard (@gold.ac.uk)

Goldsmiths Research Centres/Groups

Michael's work falls under three areas: transnational cinema, popular music and media theory. In terms of the former, he has especially developed a strong profile in European cinemas. Publications include his co-edited book Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context (Rochester, 2014) and his monograph on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz, Impossible Cartographies (2013), which was the first comprehensive academic work in English on this important filmmaker. In Popular music, he has written a series of publications on post-punk and industrial musics. He also co-organised the 2010 Noise, Affect, Politics conference that led to two edited books on noise that have become definitive in their field. He is also a media theorist, mainly in the areas of media ecologies and media archaeology. His most substantial contribution to both fields is his monograph, Guerrilla Networks, which was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2018, and which excavates a range of 1970s radical media practices

Academic qualifications

  • PhD in Art History and Theory, University of Sydney 2004
  • MA in English (Film Studies), University of Otago 1999
  • BA Honours (Communications) University of Technology, Sydney 1994

Teaching and supervision

Michael is primarily teaching on the MA in Film and Screen Studies.

He has taught a wide range of film, television and media studies courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as supervising multiple MAs and PhDs.
He is interested in PhD supervision in film, television and audiovisual media, especially involving media archaeology and ecologies approaches

Research interests

Michael has extensively researched a variety of audiovisual media focusing on cult and transnational film, contemporary television, popular music, media archaeology noise, digital screen cultures and aesthetic and political philosophies.

In media ecologies this includes the special “Unnatural Ecologies” issue of Fibreculture he co-edited with Jussi Parikka, while in transnational cinema he has written numerous journal articles and contributed to the Blackwell Companion to Eastern European Cinemas (2012)

Michael's most significant externally funded project was the Science without Borders/CAPES funded “Special Visiting Researcher” fellowship for the project: “The Social Media Mapping of Popular Music Scenes” (2014-2016). This project included, in addition to extensive research periods and pedagogy in Brazil, hosting of a number of PhD and postdoctoral researchers in the UK. The project involved researching and mapping a range of music genres in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with reference to international research on music, digital mapping and urban space.
Other significant projects include the two already mentioned monographs on Raúl Ruiz and Guerrilla Networks, two edited journal issues on the return of Twin Peaks in 2016, the co-edited collection Music/Video (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the successful international conference Trans TV which took place in September, 2017, and led to a series of four edited and introduced dossiers in Critical Studies in Television between 2018 and 2020. He has also published recently on the experimental film and video work of Józef Robakowski, Genealogies of VR and immersive media and contributed a chapter on The Clash for the Oxford Companion to Punk Rock. Currently he is writing a fourth monograph on the music of the British queer electronic group Coil, and developing one project on immersive audiovisual media from expanded cinema to VR and another on contemporary depictions of time travel and time loops across multiple media

Featured publications

2018: Guerrilla Networks: An Anarchaeology of 1970s Radical Media Ecologies
A monograph based on my research into radical media ecologies in the 1970s in film, video, radio, television and music.

2020: Genealogies of Immersive Media and Virtual Reality (VR) as Practical Aesthetic Machines
This chapter explores genealogies of virtual immersive technologies as modes of practical aesthetics, enabling concrete experiences of perceptual transformation and metamorphosis

2020: Trans TV Dossier III: Trans TV Re-Evaluated
This introduction asks in what ways internet distributed television has facilitated diverse representations in contemporary television and provides a reading of recent Trans representations

2019: Art as Energy: Józef Robakowski from the Workshop of Film Form to Video Performance and Energy Recordings
This chapter explores Józef Robakowski's experimental work across multiple media including experimental photography, film and video, video installation, and video performance

2013: The Cinema of Raul Ruiz: Impossible Cartographies
This book is the first major academic engagement with the idiosyncratic Chilean-born filmmaker Raul Ruiz.

Grants and awards

2017: CAPES/Science Without Borders, Special Visiting Researcher Fellowship: The Social Media Mapping of Popular Music Scenes
This project was valued at 65,000£ in total and included in addition to extensive research periods and pedagogy in Brazil, hosting of a number of PhD and postdoctoral researchers in the UK

Publications and research outputs

Article

Book

Book Section

Edited Book

Edited Journal

Conferences and talks

2021: Dark and the Reinvention of Time Travel Television: Parallel Worlds, Multiple Embodiments and Quantum Entanglement
Presentation at the 2021 BAFTSS conference which took place online, exploring the resurgence of time travel television and the specific case of the German series Dark

2021: 'Noise Annoys, Noise is the Future': Communicational Noise in Cybernetic Theories and Popular Music Practices
This was a presentation of my chapter at a workshop for an international publication on noise, Noise as a Productive Element in Music, organised in Belgium but taking place online for the volume

2021: Apocalyptic Visions of a Society in Ruins: ‘Cinematic Monuments’ to 1989 and Late Socialism
This was a keynote address at the Przeostrzenia. Polish Cinema in the Face of Political Transformations 1945 and 1989, conference at the University of Warsaw/Online

2018: Immersive Media, Virtual Reality and the Media Archaeology of Audiovision
This was a keynote address at the 4th Network Society conference, Netizen21: Beyond Personal Account, Hangzhou, China