Melanie Selfe

Biography

Melanie graduated in Film and Television Studies (First Class) from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 2002. She secured AHRB support to pursue an MA in Film Studies (Distinction) at the University of Nottingham in 2003, following which she transferred to UEA to complete her PhD, ‘The role of film societies in the presentation and mediation of “cultural” film in post-war Nottingham’, an archivally centred cultural history, funded by the AHRC. In 2006, she returned to Aberystwyth, and her audience research roots, to work as the RA on Audiences and Receptions of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema. This project was led by Prof. Martin Barker and was the first study of its type to be funded by the British Board of Film Classification. She joined the Centre for Cultural Policy Research in 2007 as an RCUK Research Fellow and was appointed Lecturer in Cultural Policy in 2011.

Research Interest

Dr Melanie Selfe is a Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Centre for Cultural Policy Research. Her work centres on the organisations, infrastructure, policies and information networks that enable access to and participation within the cultural and creative sphere. Key areas of interest include geographic variations in creative sector policy and practice; and the role of amateur and professional status in the production, consumption and criticism of the arts. She conducts research on both historical and contemporary topics and has expertise in archival work, reception analysis, audience research techniques and organisational ethnography. She is also the course director of the Centre’s new MSc in Creative Industries and Cultural Policy, which will launch in September 2016. Many of Melanie’s publications to date have explored aspects of British film culture, including the regional expansion of the film society movement, the development of specialist and subsidised film exhibition, the critical and cultural reception of foreign language films in the UK, and the role of published critics and organisations like the British Film Institute and the BBC in shaping and cultivating audience taste. In 2009 she secured funding from the Carnegie Trust to conduct an archival study of film criticism as a professional practice, and the resulting publications examined film criticism’s relationship to the film industry, to libel law, and to the institutions of print and broadcast media in the mid 20th century. Her continuing research in this area includes further historical work on the role of film criticism in the development of cinephile audience cultures, and an examination of current trends within film policy, with a particular focus on exhibition, marketing, and audience development and education. In 2013-2014, Melanie also worked with colleagues Prof. Philip Schlesinger and Dr Ealasaid Munro to examine contemporary creative sector business support in Scotland, exploring the way client-facing working practices are shaped by a mixture of local conditions, larger UK policy and international trends in creative industries thinking. She was Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded Creative Economy Knowledge Exchange project, Supporting Creative Business: The Cultural Enterprise Office and its clients. (AHK002570/1), and the team’s findings can be now be explored in the book arising from the project: Schlesinger, P., Selfe, M., and Munro, E. (2015) Curators of Cultural Enterprise: A Critical Analysis of a Creative Business Intermediary.Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137478870