Professor James Lyons

Prof. James Lyons is the author of Selling Seattle, profiled in The New York Times as a book 'a visitor ought to read to truly understand the American cities and regions where they live, work and travel.' Read the profile here. He has also appeared in The New York Times talking about his research on Starbucks. Read it here. Prof. Lyons was amongst the first scholars to analyse Starbucks' power as a global brand, in his widely-cited Cultural Studies article '‘Think Seattle, act globally’ Speciality coffee, commodity biographies and the promotion of place.'

Prof. Lyons is also the author of Miami Vice, described by Prof. David Thornburn (MIT) in his Cinema Journal review as 'the richest account of a single television program I've ever read', and co-editor of Quality Popular Television , Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, and The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. He is one of the founding editors of the film journal Scope and serves on the editorial advisory board.

His most recent monograph is entitled Documentary, Performance and Risk, and explores how some of the most significant recent American feature documentaries use performance to dramatically animate major categories of risk. It was described by Prof. Laurie Ouellette (University of Minnesota) as 'conceptually innovative, beautifully written, and politically timely.' You can listen to him being interviewed about his reseach for the Factual America Podcast here.

He was awarded £50,000 to work with award-winning advertising agency Rubber Republic on a documentary on risk and everyday life as part of the AHRC's REACT Future Documentary scheme. You can watch the documentary here: http://risktakersguide.com/. The documentary won the Ramillas Interactive Fund Award at Sheffield International Doc/Fest.

Prof. Lyons' work on risk has extended to writing a case study on the visualisation of climate change for the Government Chief Scientific Advisor's report "Innovation: Managing Risk, Not Avoiding it", and he was on the expert panel of the EPSRC-funded network Models to Decisions (M2D), which explored decision-making under uncertainty.

He is currently working on his fourth monograph, Adventure Sports Documentaries: Performances on the Edge, to be published by Routledge.

He has also published widely on the subject of American independent film (see publications). Together with Yannis Tzioumakis he has published a new book collection of original essays, entitled Indie TV: Industry, Aesthetics and Medium Specificity, which examines American independent film's interface with the converged landscape of contemporary television. The book was described by Prof. Jennifer Holt (UC Santa Barbara) as 'fascinating and wide-ranging' and by Prof. Dana Polan (NYU) as 'strong equally in conceptualization, and industrial and aesthetic analysis'.

Research supervision:

I am interested in considering research projects across the broad spectrum of US film and television.