Professor Neil Ewen (he / him)

I am an Associate Professor of Media, Communications and Culture. I'm a Deputy Head of the Department of Communications, Drama and Film, and the Subject Lead for Communications.

 

I joined Exeter in 2021 to lead the development of Communications as a subject area at the university. I worked previously at the universities of Winchester, Portsmouth, Southampton, and East Anglia. I earned my BA in English Studies with Film and Media Studies at the University of Stirling (2001) and my MA in Modernism (2003) and Ph.D. (2010) at UEA, where I wrote my thesis on football and national identity in England and Scotland.  I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

 

My research interests lie broadly in the politics of contemporary media and culture, and are grounded in the traditions of Cultural Studies. I like to ask questions about power and identity across a range of contemporary cultural forms, including film and television, sport, political communication, and video games. One key thread that runs through my research is celebrity, and how famous figures in different contexts become lightning rods in debates about power, culture, and identity, often mobilising nostalgia, sometimes progressively but often retrogressively.

 

I'm the co-editor of First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship, and Cultural Politics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), Capitalism, Crime and Media in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and special issues of Television and New Media on the TV show Friends (2018) and Celebrity Studies on populist political celebrities in contemporary Europe (2020). Since 2015, I have edited the Cultural Report section of Celebrity Studies journal (Routledge).

 

I'm currently working on an edited collection on nostalgia for the 1990s with Professor Shelley Cobb (Southampton) and Dr Hannah Hamad (Cardiff), provisionally titled Coming Back Stronger: 90s Nostalgia in Contemporary Media Culture, to be published with Bloomsbury Academic, and books on time and nostalgia in video games for the book series Games and Contemporary Culture (Routledge) which I launched in 2023 with my Exeter colleagues Dr Aditya Deshbandhu and Dr Alexander R.E. Taylor, and Dr Shannon Lawlor. I'm also currently preparing a monograph on football in film and digital media.

 

I'm an Affiliated Member of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam. I'm also a member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) and the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA). I have extensive experience of curriculum development, programme leadership, programme validation, external examining, and PGR supervision and examination.

 

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I welcome PhD research proposals from prospective candidates interested in working in any aspect of contemporary media culture. I am especially interested in proposals related to the following areas / themes:

 

• celebrity
• sport
• political cultures and communication
• pre-digital nostalgia and cultural memory
• national identity
• 1990s and Generation X
• video games and immersive media

 

Guidance for PhD proposals can be found here. 

 

 

Current Students

• 2022 - present, Karl Gustav Thunberg, University of Exeter, The Business of Archaeogaming: how productive are the cooperative efforts between the games industry and the heritage industry? (p/t)
• 2023 - present, Razan Seraj Alem, University of Exeter, Dark Tourism and Digital Storytelling in English Museums (f/t)
• 2023 - present, Ziyi Song, University of Exeter, Perception, Negotiation and Representation: Cultural Identities of Young British Chinese on Social Media (f/t)
• 2024- present, Jing Lei, Reshaping Gender Dynamics in Chinese Pop Culture Fandoms (f/t)

 

Ph.D. Completions

2017 – 2020, Shannon Lawlor, University College Dublin, 'This game plays you as much as you play it': Self-reflexivity and technology in video games (f/t) – Prof Diane Negra, Director of Studies; Dr Neil Ewen, second supervisor (viva: 29 June 2020)

 

 

 

Office 6, White House, Thornlea, Exeter, EX4 4LA, UK.

 

n.ewen@exeter.ac.uk | +44 (0)1392 725054