Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Ros Gray

Revolutionary cinema and its global film making networks; the screen as site of radical gathering; postcolonial and political theory; urban cultures and spatial theory; contemporary film and video art.

Academic qualifications

EDUCATION

2002–2007
Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, PhD Visual Cultures (full-time)
Thesis title: ‘Ambitions of Cinema: Revolution, Event, Screen’
The thesis explored the theoretical implications of the African Revolution through an examination of its radical cinematic inventions. My research investigated points where the cinema screen became a site of radical gathering and ambitions of cinema emerged that expressed a revolutionary desire. The thesis mapped out a relational geography between different late liberation struggles of the 1970s and 1980s produced by cinema in the networks of connections lived out and constructed through radical drives. The exploration of aesthetics of liberation is the point of departure to investigate how screens, as urban surfaces of projection and reflection, appearance and masking, emerge from the world and have material and psychical effects in the world.
Supervisors: Professor Irit Rogoff and Mr Kodwo Eshun
Examiners: Professor Laura Mulvey and Mr John Akomfrah
Submitted 30 September 2007

2000–2001
Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, MA Cultural Studies (Distinction)
Directors of Study: Professor Scott Lash and Dr François Vergès

1991–1995
St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, MA English Language and Literature (2,1)

Grants & awards

2005 – University of London Central Research Fund Grant of £1,500 to fund fieldwork in Mozambique
Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) Grant of £999 for a three-week study trip to Burkina Faso
Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College Two awards of £100 towards my PhD research
2002 – Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) MPhil/PhD scholarship covering fees and maintenance for three years
1993 – St Anne’s College, University of Oxford Collection Prize

Professional activities

PRESENT APPOINTMENTS

Department of Art, Goldsmiths College 2007–ongoing
Lecturer in Critical Studies 0.4
My lectureship involves teaching Critical Studies at all levels of the BA Art Practice. As co-ordinator for Level 3 I have administrative responsibility for organising the supervision of dissertation work. I am second supervisor to Nina Hoechtl, a PhD student who is researching Mexican lucha libre as a performative site of possibility for a queer reading strateg.y

Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College 2009 – 2010
Visiting Tutor BA Visual Cultures
I am teaching the BA Level II elective course ‘The Moving Image’, covering a colleague on research leave.

Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art 2009–ongoing
Tutor for Research and PhD supervisor
My role as Tutor for Research involves liaising with the Head of Department and external partners to organise research activities for MPhil/PhD students. I am currently supervising the José Filipe Costa, a filmmaker who is doing a practice-based PhD on the role of cinema in the Portuguese revolution of 1974, focusing on the cultural memory surrounding Thomas Harlan’s film Torre Bela

Conferences

Co-Chair of ‘Thinking with Documentary in the Revolution’, Visible Evidence, Istanbul, August 2010
‘The Vanguard of the World: Cinemas of the African Revolution’, Building an African Presence in the Twentieth Century at Columbia University, New York, 29 April–1 May 2010
Speaker, Henrique Neves and Clément Darrasse’s ‘Baile ao Ar Livre’, Atelier Real, Lisbon, 26 March 2010
Participant in Catarina Simåo’s ‘Fora de Campo – Sobre o Arquivo de Cinema de Moçambique’, Atelier Real, Lisbon, 28 November 2009
‘Renée Green’s Elliptical Mappings: Dreams of Cinema and Utopian Islands’, exhibition talk at ‘Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Water Between’ at the National Maritime Museum, London, 29 March 2009
Panel talk between Angela Ferreira, Ros Gray, Andrew Renton and Edgar Schmitz at the opening of Angela Ferreira and Walid Raad’s art works for ‘Curating Architecture’ exhibition at Showroom Gallery, London, 2 December 2008
‘Mozambican Revolution: Trajectories of Radical Film Theory and Practice’, Geographies of Film Theory, conference at Birkbeck College, 27 and 28 July 2008
‘Third Cinema: Filming the Revolution in Mozambique’, Curating the Postcolonial, conference organised by the Royal College of Art at the Goethe Institute, London, 23 January 2007
‘Algumas experimentações emergentes nas telas em Moçambique’, Encontros – Maputo 2005, Festival of Documentary Films at the Centro Cultural Franco-Moçambicano, Maputo, Mozambique, 27 September–4 October 2005
Respondent to Susan Kelly, ‘The Transversal and the Invisible: So how do you really make a work of art that’s not a work of art?’, Strategies of (In)visibility, organised by Re-public Art and Goldsmiths College, Camden Arts Centre, London, 4 February 2005
‘Momentary Stability’, Warp: Woof – Aurality, Musicality, Textuality, CongressCATH 2003 at University of Leeds, 10–12 July 2003. Session: Re-channel.

Research interests

2010 – 2011
‘Liquid Reader’ inter-departmental research project between the departments of Art, Design and Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
2008 – 2010
I am co-editing (with Kodwo Eshun) a special issue of the peer-reviewed academic journal Third Text on ‘The Militant Image – A Ciné-Geography’, due for publication in November 2010. We are organising a conference and film festival to accompany the special issue.
2008
Peer reviewer for Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture of an article entitled ‘Skin: Textile: Film’, which analysed the work of Ann Hamilton through notions of embodiment and the haptic.

Selected publications

‘The African Revolution Becomes Something Else’ (provisional title), in Irit Rogoff (ed.), Translating the Image (forthcoming)

Respondent to Renée Green, in Irit Rogoff (ed.), Fieldwork (forthcoming)

‘Chinese Whispers: Variations on Textile’, in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Volume 1, Issue 2, July 2003

‘Lost and Found: A Modicum of Dignity’, in The Journal of Visual Culture, 1 (1), 2002

Conference papers, guest lectures

‘Third Cinema: Filming the Revolution in Mozambique’, Curating the Postcolonial, conference organised by the Royal College of Art at the Goethe Institute, London, 23 January 2007

‘Algumas experimentações emergentes nas telas em Moçambique’, Encontros – Maputo 2005, Festival of Documentary Films at the Centro Cultural Franco–Moçambicano, Maputo, Mozambique, 27 September–4 October 2005

Speaker, Henrique Neves and Clément Darrasse’s ‘Made in.’, British
Council, Lisbon, 26 March 2010

‘Momentary Stability’, Warp:Woof – Aurality, Musicality, Textuality, Congress CATH 2003 at University of Leeds, 10 – 12 July 2003. Session: Re-channel.

PUBLICATIONS

‘Editorial’ (with Kodwo Eshun), in ‘The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography’, a special issue of Third Text, November 2010, forthcoming
Catalogue essay for ‘Renée Green: Endless Dreams’, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, 2010, forthcoming
 ‘Portugal’s Revolutionary Process – Translating the African Revolution’, in Irit Rogoff (ed.), Translating the Image (Hatje Cantz), forthcoming
Respondent to Renée Green, in Irit Rogoff (ed.), Fieldwork, forthcoming
Review of the exhibition ‘Front of House’, featuring Marcos Corrales, Angela Ferreira, Narelle Jubelin and Andrew Renton with the UK premiere of a screening of Maison Tropicale by Manthia Diawara, 16 April–28 May 2008, Parasol Unit, London, for Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture, 7 (2), 2009
‘Chinese Whispers: Variations on Textile’, in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Volume 1, Issue 2, July 2003
‘Lost and Found: A Modicum of Dignity’, in The Journal of Visual Culture, 1 (1), 2002