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Annette Frieda Kuhn, FBA is a British author, cultural historian, educator, researcher, editor and feminist. She is known for her work in Film studies, visual culture, film history and cultural memory. She is Professor and Research Fellow in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London.
She co-edited Feminism and Materialism (1978) with AnnMarie Wolpe, was part of the founding editorial collective of Feminist Review (1979- ) and was a member of the women's photography group Second Sight.The other group members were Frances Borzello, Jill Pack and Cassandra Wedd; see Kuhn, The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality, pg 9-10.
In the mid-1970s, Kuhn began writing, teaching and publishing in film studies, often from a feminist standpoint. Her books included Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (1982, rev. ed. 1994), in which Kuhn defined a variant of fictional realism as "new women's cinema" which targeted a working woman audience of the mid-1970s; and The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (1985). Kuhn co-edited The Women's Companion to International Film (1990) with Susannah Radstone. She taught classes in adult and higher education in both the UK and the USA. (1997). 9780748609000, Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748609000
Kuhn served on the editorial board of the journal Screen from 1976 to 1985 and rejoined the journal as a co-editor on its move to Oxford University Press in 1989, standing down in 2014. In the late 1970s, she joined five other women in forming a feminist forum which roundly criticized the fashion press and their perpetuation of a stereotype in women's clothing. In 1986 she completed a PhD on the history of film censorship at the University of London. From 1984 to the early 1990s she was a commissioning editor for 'Questions for Feminism', a series of socialist-feminist books published by Verso, and in the late 1980s worked as desk editor in Verso's editorial office in London. Some documents from the early phase of Kuhn's career are lodged in the Women's Library at the London School of Economics.
In 1989 Kuhn joined the University of Glasgow as a lecturer in Film and Television and was promoted to Reader in Film and Television Studies in 1991, in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies. She moved to Lancaster University in 1998 as Reader in Cultural Research and was promoted to Professor of Film Studies in 2000. In 2006, Kuhn moved to Queen Mary University of London since 2006 and is now Professor and Research Fellow in Film Studies. Since 2002 she has served on the Advisory Board of the Raphael Samuel History Centre (University of East London/Birkbeck University of London) and on the Education and Culture Committee of Phoenix Cinema (Finchley, London) since 2009.
Kuhn has held visiting professorships at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Masaryk University and Stockholm University; and fellowships at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Macquarie University, and the Five Colleges Women's Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke College. Kuhn has delivered keynote lectures, invited talks and workshops also in Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain and Switzerland. Her writings have been translated into at least ten languages.
Concurrently, Kuhn has inquired into photography and cultural memory, with a particular interest in the uses of and meanings attaching to family photographs, conducting research and workshops, giving talks and producing writings on the subject. Her book Family Secrets is widely cited and continues to be drawn on by writers and artists, especially feminists, conducting autoethnographic work with personal photographs, as well as by readers inspired to conduct memory work with their own family albums.
The Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies (2012), which Kuhn co-authored with her Queen Mary University of London colleague Guy Westwell, was several years in the making. It is grounded in a systematic overview of the discipline, both historically and as it is currently taught and researched, with the aim of producing an inclusive map of the field that would eventually generate the topics addressed in the dictionary, permit assessment of each headword and entry in light of its place in the discipline's overall architecture, supply a picture of the interconnections between various areas of inquiry, and generate a framework for cross-references that would allow users to follow personal paths through the dictionary and make their own discoveries about the discipline. In both its print and online versions, the Dictionary is widely used in screen studies teaching at all levels, as well as by film critics and film-lovers. (2012). 9780199587261, OUP Oxford. ISBN 9780199587261
In 2004, she was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy, and in 2016 to Membership of the European Academy (Academia Europaea).
The Annette Kuhn Essay Award was established by Screen in 2014, in recognition of Kuhn's outstanding contribution to Screen and her wider commitment to the development of screen studies and screen theory.
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