Martha Shearer

I joined UCD in 2020 as an Ad Astra Fellow and am now Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Film Studies. I teach and research film history and theory, focusing in particular on US cinema and on questions of space, genre, and feminist film history. My first book, New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), reads the spatiality of the film musical in relationship to the history and geography of its primary setting, arguing that the transformation that New York underwent after World War II (suburbanisation, urban renewal) constituted a major challenge to the genre’s representational strategies, leading to its eventual decline. I have co-edited two books: with Julie Lobalzo Wright, Musicals at the Margins: Genre, Boundaries, Canons (Bloomsbury, 2021), which focuses on films and media at the margins and boundaries of the musical genre in a range of historical and global contexts, seeking to rework not only theories of the musical but also theories of genre more broadly; and with Aaron Hunter, Women and New Hollywood: Gender, Creative Labor, and 1970s American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2023), which focuses on the labour of women working as directors and in other creative roles and so challenges the auteurist and masculinist understanding of the New Hollywood. I have also published widely on gentrification and contemporary US cinema. My current book project is a history and theory of real estate and US cinema and television since the 2008 global financial crisis, encompassing texts where real estate is a narrative subject and/or aesthetic problem as well as studio development projects and points of collaboration between media and real estate industries.

I have been interviewed for Sky News and BBC Radio 4 and for articles in The Guardian, The Observer, Financial Times, and Newsweek. I have also appeared on podcasts including Fantasy/Animation and Audiovisual Cultures, and I have introduced films at BFI Southbank and the IFI. I am a member of the Humanities Institute.