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Staff Profile

Dr Tom Cuthbertson

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow

  • Email: tom.cuthbertson@ncl.ac.uk
  • Address: School of Modern Languages
    Old Library Building
    Newcastle University
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
    United Kingdom
Background

Introduction

I joined Newcastle University as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in September 2020. I grew up just down the road from Newcastle in a town in Northumberland. I attended my local state secondary school before studying for a degree in French and Italian at the University of Glasgow. I went on to complete masters and doctoral degrees at the University of Oxford, with intervening detours into the publishing industry.


I am a specialist in contemporary film. My work is driven by a fascination with how we strive to make sense of our lives, identities and place in the world, and with the role that art plays in these attempts and processes. This fascination has led to a sustained engagement in my research to date with the limits and possibilities of autobiography, and in particular to an examination of the specific autobiographical tools offered by experimental film and screen media.


Research Interests

  • Autobiographical Film
  • Experimental Cinema
  • French and Belgian Film
  • Environmental Filmmaking
  • Moving Image Art
  • Creative Arts Practice


Qualifications

  • DPhil, French and Film Studies, University of Oxford
  • MSt, Modern Languages, University of Oxford
  • MA (Hons), French and Italian, University of Glasgow
Research

Previous Research

My past research opened dialogues between contemporary autobiographical filmmaking from France and Belgium and broader developments in international visual culture. Situating the autobiographical work of filmmakers Chantal Akerman, Vincent Dieutre, Boris Lehman and Agnès Varda in relation to a marked expansion of contemporary uses of reenactment (clearly apparent today, for instance, in creative arts practices, documentary film and television, or multiple examples of ‘living history’), I theorised a radical strategy of self-representation and self-investigation that I termed autobiographical reenactment. Through a series of close readings, I explored the varied forms and contexts in which autobiographical reenactment appears: I showed filmmakers reenacting their own past experiences, reenacting the experiences of loved ones or of lives revived from across history, and reenacting artworks in which they recognised something of themselves or of how they wished to appear. As encountered in all of these variants (and sometimes in combination), autobiographical reenactment sustains compelling, often challenging engagements with identity, subjectivity, memory, knowledge, time, feeling, loss, truth and history, whilst continually prompting us to rethink our understanding of what autobiography can be and can do. This research forms the basis of my first book Autobiographical Reenactment in French and Belgian Film: Repetition, Memory, Self (Legenda, 2022).


Current Research

My current research loosens the exclusive Franco-Belgian framing of my previous scholarship to integrate a much more extensive range of international and intercultural film texts and to explore connections and commonalities between them. My Leverhulme Trust funded project (Environmental Selves: Film, Autobiography and the Natural World) argues for the existence of a ‘nonhuman turn’ in contemporary autobiographical filmmaking. Through close readings of an international range of experimental films, I foreground a striking number of instances in which filmmakers identify with nonhuman elements from the natural world (with plant and animal life; with chemical and mineral matter; with solids, liquids and gases; with weather and atmospheric conditions; with landscapes and spaces; with cycles, processes and rhythms) in ways that fundamentally unsettle the stability and boundedness of the human. These filmmakers lead us to understand their bodies, lives, feelings, memories and identities as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it. In analysing the varied ‘environmental selves’ that are thus produced, articulated and interrogated on screen, I explore a distinctive mode of autobiographical filmmaking that powerfully refuses a separation of the human and the nonhuman, and ask how such artistic experiments might help us to think differently about the place we occupy in the world, along with the rights, responsibilities and possibilities that this place entails.

Teaching
During my time at Newcastle University, I will be offering research-led teaching on a variety of Undergraduate and Graduate modules within the School of Modern Languages. 
Publications