Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr. Janet Harbord

Janet Harbord's work engages with philosophies of screen media in a post-cinematic context. She has written on the subjects of memory, the image and archives: inertia, speed and energies of film: montage and cutting: spatial relations and film circulation: cultural translation and supplementation: affect, gesture and the image.

Janet is currently working on three research projects:

- Cutting: the montage of images and other things is a book project examining sites and practices of cutting, when joins are made visible and invisible, celebrated and hidden. I am interested in the cultural value assigned to cutting on a variety of surfaces (celluloid, the body, the canvas), and in the etymology of cutting that includes in its history the reworking of film images, still images, pixels, plant life and skin.

- Tracking the Moving Image, Mapping the Screen is a collaborative Leverhulme funded project examining the place of screens in a post-cinematic context (and is part of the larger Spaces of the Media programme). The project compares screen culture in three cities: London, Shanghai and Cairo. I am currently researching (with Rachel Moore) the use of screen technologies at the Science Museum (London), artists’ projects on the Egware Road and London transport hubs.

- MediaCityUK is a multi-institutional research project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), developing a framework for innovation and research in a new media hub built on the site of Salford Quays. With Nick Couldry, I am a principle investigator of the project, which in the first year examines utopia and architecture, inscriptions of memory and place, and re-mediation in a site of media production.

Janet Harbord is co-founder, with Julian Henriques, of the Screen School at Goldsmiths.

Areas of supervision

Adnan Hadzi ‘New technologies and the copy-left movement’

Tara Blake-Wilson ‘Re-assemblage: film archives and the auratic’

Wendy Jordan ‘A musicological analysis of film music as a new narrative structure’

Stefania Charitou ‘Multiplicity in the re-siting of film’

Su-Anne Yeo ‘Diasporic film cultures and film festivals’

Hong Lee Real ‘Pusan and Berlin Film Festivals and divided nations’.

Selected publications

Books

(2009) Chris Marker: La Jetée, London & Cambridge, Massachusetts: Afterall Books & MIT

(2007) The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies, Cambridge UK & Malden USA: Polity Press

(2002) Film Cultures, Sage Publications: London: New Delhi and Thousand Oaks
(Korean translation of Film Cultures 2005)

Edited Books

Campbell J and Harbord J (eds) (2002) Temporalities: autobiography and everyday life, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press

Campbell J and Harbord J (eds) (1998) Psycho-politics, London: Taylor and Francis

Articles (a selection)

Harbord J & Berry. C (2009 forthcoming) ‘Archive, Surveillance, Attention: Tracking the Screen in Public Spaces’ in Helen Grace (ed.) Technovisuality and Cultural Re-enchantment, University of Hong Kong Press

Harbord J (2009) ‘Film Festivals-Time-Event’, in Iordinova D (ed.) Film Festivals: The Festival Circuit, London: Wallflower Press

Harbord J & Blake T (2008) ‘Typewriters, cameras and love affairs: the fateful haunting of Margaret Mead’, Journal of Media Practice, Volume 9/3: Intellect Ltd, pp.215-227 ISSN 14682753

Harbord J (2008) ‘Cinematic Hat Tricks’, New Formations, Volume 62, Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 149-155. ISSN 09502378

Harbord J (2007) ‘Contingency’s work: Kracauer’s Theory of Film and the trope of the accidental’, New Formations Volume 61, Spring, pp.90-103. ISSN 09502378

Harbord J (2007) ‘Animal Astronauts’, Stimulus Respond Journal, http://www. stimulusrespond.com.

Harbord J (2007) ‘Where Does it Happen? John Casavettes and the Cinema at Breaking Point’, Screen, Volume 48/4, Oxford Journals, pp.555-558 ISSN 00369543

Harbord J (2007) ‘The fragile relations of Ecology’, Vertigo: Film and TV Quarterly, Volume 3/6 ISSN 09687904

(2006) ‘Digital film and “late capitalism”: a cinema for heroes?’ in James Curran and David Morley (eds) Media and Cultural Theory, London: Routledge

(2005) ‘And our bodies will grow transparent: the work of Mike Hoolboom’, Vertigo Vol 2 No 9, ISSN 09687904

(2004) ‘The Poetry of Space’, Vertigo  Vol 1 No 8,  ISSN 09687904

(2003) ‘In the Frame – fleetingly: revisiting Kracauer’,  Scope: Journal of Film Studies

 (2002) ‘Platitudes of Everyday Life?’ in Campbell and Harbord (eds) Temporalities: autobiography and everyday life, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0717905575X

(1999) (with J. Campbell)  ‘Playing it Again: citation, reiteration or circularity? In Theory, Culture, Society, Vol 16/2, pp. 229-40., reprinted in Vikki Bell (ed.) Performativity and Belonging, Sage: London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi

Conferences

July 2009 ‘White in Tarkovsky’s Mirror’ Anolfini Centre, University of Bristol Conference on Colour.

July 2009 ‘Watching people watch: paying attention to screens in London’s Science Museum’ (with Rachel Moore), University of Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle Institute for Research on the Cinema and Audiovisual.

April 2009 ‘Film festivals-Time-Event’, International Film Festivals Conference, Univeristy of St Andrews, Scotland

March 2009 ‘Archive, Surveillance, Attention: Tracking the Moving Image in London, Shanghai and Cairo’, (with Chris Berry, Kay Dickinson, Rachel Moore), Conference ‘In the Very Beginning, at the Very End’, Udine, Italy.

February 2009 ‘The World Image and the Eamses’ Powers of Ten’, Research Seminar, Univeristy of Kent, UK

November 2008 ‘Tracking the Screen in Public Space’, with Chris Berry, Technovisuality and Cultural Re-enchantment Conference, Chinese University of Hong Kong & Hong Kong Shue Yan University, Hong Kong.

November 2008 ‘Copernicus and I: Perspective and the Eamses’ Powers of Ten’, Conference of ‘Technology and Desire - The Transgressive Art of Moving Images’, ZKM - Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany.