Theresa completed her PhD, ‘Disciplining the Spectator: Subjectivity, the Body and Contemporary Spectatorship’ in 2011. This explored the spectator’s corporeal engagement with film. It examined the socially and historically constructed nature of spectatorship, the specific practices that work to create contemporary cinema’s corporeal address, and the regulatory implications of this address. Focusing on films such as Funny Games, Irréversible, Wolf Creek, and the genre of ‘torture porn’ more generally, it examines how the regulation of cinema in the contemporary era has become less a question of the institutionalised censorship of texts, and more a question of regulating the ‘self’ and establishing appropriate spectatorial relations.

  • BA (Hons) in Sociology and Social Research (Lancaster University)
  • MA in Visual Culture (Lancaster University)
  • Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (Middlesex University)
  • PhD in Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Expertise: film regulation, extreme cinema, ‘media effects’, film and gender, film cultures, audience and reception studies

Teaching across all levels of undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes in the Media Department, Theresa currently acts as module leader for:

Media Discourses: a core level 4 course for all students on BA Advertising, PR and Media, BA Journalism and Media, BA Publishing and Media, and BA Media and Cultural Studies

Media Practices: a compulsory course for level 6 student on BA Media and Cultural Studies

Dissertation: supervising a broad range of undergraduate dissertations in BA Media and Cultural Studies

Working in Media and the Cultural Industries: a core module on the MA Media and Communications Management

She also looks forward to teaching Transgressive Cultures for level 6 students on BA Media and Cultural Studies from 2014

Articles and chapters in edited books

Theresa Cronin, ‘Media Effects’, in Martin Conboy, ed. The Routledge Companion to British Media History, (forthcoming 2014)

Refereed articles in academic Journals

Theresa Cronin; “‘Media Effects’ and the Subjectification of Film Regulation”, The Velvet Light Trap: Special Issue on Censorship, No 63, Spring 2009

Recent conference contributions

Theresa Cronin; 2011; “The Monstrous Masculine: Constructions of Masculinity in the Discourses of Extreme Cinema”; The Monster Inside Us, The Monsters Around Us: Monstrousity and Humanity; De Montford University

Theresa Cronin; 2009; “Disciplining the Spectator: The Subjectification of Film Regulation”; Screen Conference 2009: Screen Theorizing Today; University of Glasgow

Theresa Cronin; 2009; “Guilty Pleasures: Media Effects and Technologies of the Self”; IAMHIST Conference 2009: The Media, Social Fears and Moral Panics; University of Wales, Aberystwyth

Theresa Cronin; 2009; “Horrific Subjects: Alienation and Transgression in Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games”; The New Extremism: Contemporary European Cinema; Anglia Ruskin University