Dr Zlatina Nikolova

I joined the University of Exeter in early 2021 as Lecturer in Film and English before progressing to Lecturer in Film in early 2025. I have taught broadly across the undergraduate curriculum for Film Studies and on some modules for English. In my teaching practice, I foster an inclusive and interdisciplinary environment that encourages students to think about film, TV and moving image as a whole as part of a broader social, cultural and political networks.

My research is defined by several core themes: an interest in the technologies of moving image production and viewership with a specific emphasis on the digital environment, the historical evolution of moving image technology between the early 20th century and the early 21st century, and the affective relationship between the individual viewer and the moving image as mediated through the multiple digital environments and devices that construct the contemporary viewing experience. 

I am currently finishing a monograph titled Constantly Streaming, contracted to Bloomsbury. Broadly, the book reflects on the individual viewer's changing relationship to moving image content under the influences and pressures exerted by the increased digitisation of spectatorship. Individual chapters are devoted to the processes by which streaming platforms construct and deconstruct the communal experience of film spectatorship, the affective intimacy of the individual spectator who interacts with the moving image on their personal touchscreen device, algorithms as critics and curators without human agency, and film itself as it transforms into a digital 'thing' amongst many other digital things that clutter our desktops and browsers. 

Other publications on spectatorship, streaming, digital technologies and animation are upcoming.

I welcome dissertation proposals at undergraduate and postgraduate levels across all of these themes.

I also have specific research interests in animation and animation technologies, the broader applications of digital technologies in film and TV cultures, and immersive technologies such as VR/AR. I welcome queries for PhD proposals across all of these topics.