Dr Aidan Power (he/him)

Email: a.power3@exeter.ac.uk

Office: Queen's 254

I am primarily a film and television scholar, with a specialisation on the relationship between visual media and crises (particularly crises in capitalism, democracy, and the environment). I am also very interested in literary adaptations, science fiction, Marxist approaches to popular culture, and the disparities between the stated ideals of the European project and the material realities that have always underpinned it.

My most recent article "What Happened at All?” Coming to Terms with the Past in Foster and An Cailín Ciúin" was published in the Irish Studies Review (2025, read here). It utilises adaptation studies and intersectional feminist approaches to argue that the the gaps that emerge during the adaptation of Claire Keegan's acclaimed short story Foster encourage new ways of thinking through assumptions underpinning a brutally patriarchal Irish State. This process, I suggest, opens a dialogic space for viewers to reflect upon their reactions to the film, and by extension the degree to which they choose to confront the enduring legacies of institutional abuse in Ireland.

"Keep Your Dreams Alive: Lazzaro felice, Authoritarian Liberalism, and the Slow Death of Progress in the Italian Second Republic" (read here) instead considers the spectre of omnipresent precarity in post-Maastricht Treaty Italy. Published in The Italianist (2023), the article considers the eponymous Lazzaro as a Benjaminian witness to the ongoing authoritarian liberalist hijacking of Italian democracy, the logical endpoint of which, I argue, is a return to fascism.

"Eurocentrism, The Anthropocene and Climate Migration in Aniara", which was published in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (read here), reads the film adaptation of Harry Martinson's epic poem Aniara as a metaphor for the end days of the European Union, arguing in the process for urgent decolonisation of a viciously marketised transnational constellation that from the outset was built upon the remnants of Empire.

My first monograph Contemporary European Science Fiction Cinemas was published by Palgrave in 2018, and I co-edited the books Reality Unbound: New Departures in Science Fiction Cinema and Die Zukunft ist jetzt: Science-Fiction-Kino als audio-visueller Entwurf von Geschichte(n), Räumen und Klängen with Winfried Pauleit and Delia González de Reufels.

I have also written articles on the films of Michael Haneke and John Ford (Studies in European Cinema), European film funding (Film Studies), and tourism and sf cinema (Science Fiction Film and Television), and have published book chapters on late capitalist dating apps and Black Mirror, patriarchy and nationalism in Catalan sf, modernist European cinema, and nationhood in British dystopian cinema.

My research has been funded by the German Universities Excellence Initiative, the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme, and the British Academy. I am a Fellow of the HEA.

I am a co-founder of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media and have worked as a peer-reviewer for Academic Quarter, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres, the Postgraduate Journal of Medical Humanities, Studies in European Cinema, the Irish Studies Review, Utopian Studies, and Routledge books.

Biography:

I grew up in West Cork in Ireland. After finishing my PhD at University College Cork in 2012, I worked for three years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bremen. I returned to Ireland in 2016 where I took up a two year Government of Ireland Research Fellowship before moving to Exeter in 2018. Following a series of temporary contracts I became a permanent member of staff in 2021.