Exploring gender and intersectionality in the UK legal academy: Are women legal academics disadvantaged? Background and rationale

Even now, forty years after Doris Day's last film and twenty since her last regular television appearances, the star's name retains currency: she is often invoked as shorthand for a kind of sexuality now felt outmoded, with virginity firmly maintained until marriage. Although this assumption is widespread, close attention to the facts of Day's own life challenges it, and the majority of her film roles also prove otherwise, with Day most frequently portraying a woman of maturely sexual desires. This project will investigate why the rigid view of Day's virginity should have arisen and become so indelibly fixed to the star, one of the most popular in American cinema during the 1950s and 1960s. \n\nDespite this popularity, and the longevity of Day's career, work on the star is curiously meagre. The project will question, as it corrects, this oversight, suggesting the dearth of critical material results from the passé sexual rectitude Day seemingly evokes. Taking a twofold approach, the project both closely examines Day's onscreen roles and performances, and explores material from other popular media for the source of the virgin myth. Day featured continuously in public discourse, and media stories were often devoted to her personal life: it was widely known that she had been married three times and had a son. Why then did the pejorative label, 'the forty year old virgin' arise, and why has it stuck so tenaciously to Day, even now?\n\nThis project investigates a range of sources in order to discover why this maturely sexual star has become indelibly associated with maintained virginity. Firstly Day's characters and performances across her 39 films are analysed in detail, in order to see if maidenly qualities are always present. Initial findings indicate that this was not the case, and that though Day did play a variety of women with different sexual statuses (shy ingénue, brassy chorus girl, wife and mother, dignified widow), most often her characters had clearly defined sexual desires and experiences. Next, other contemporary films with similar female stars are examined, to see if, just by being in a Fifties or Sixties romantic comedy, Day would inevitably have to 'play a virgin'. Again, first findings indicate otherwise: other older female stars, even in comparable films from the same film-makers, did not face similar charges of prudishness, but were read as another female archetype, the experienced older woman. This figure can be seen to link to the 'cougar' emerging in today's media. Both then and now, the older woman's knowledgeable sexuality threatens even as it excites.\n\nAfter this close look within the films and Day's subsequent TV work, the project focuses on contemporary popular culture contexts. Using a variety of sources, including newspaper stories, articles from film, fan and lifestyle magazines, reviews and gossip, the developments in Day's screen 'persona' are charted, highlighting changing public perceptions. Film theorist Richard Dyer affirmed in his 1979 book 'Stars' that a star 'persona' was constructed across a range of media texts. These included film roles, but also moments outside the films, both public events such as premiere attendances, and more private ones like changes in partner. With Day, however, neither public nor private facts correspond with the aged maiden she is popularly supposed to play and be.\n\nWhat, then, is at stake in the maintenance of Day's notional chastity, both in its original context, and now? What is comforting about a woman in her late Thirties still being a virgin? Why - and whom - does the contrary insistence on her possession of sexual desires, agency and experience disturb? The project will endeavour to answer these questions as it charts changes in the public perception of Day, disseminating its findings within the academy via a monograph, refereed journal article and conference presentations, and to a wider audience via a series of public talks and screenings.

This project analyses the significance of 'special correspondence' as a new, highly popular form of Victorian journalism and its evolution in the context of developments in the periodical and newspaper press throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. It identifies and charts the careers of individual 'specials', many of whom also wrote as novelists and periodical reviewers. Characterised by a vivid, descriptive style of reportage that was criticised by some contemporary commentators as sensational, special correspondence played a key role in forming the discourses of literature and journalism at a time when the boundary between them was contested. The impact of this remains evident today in debate about the relationship between fact and fiction in the press, and in its exploration of the cultural resonance of this writing the project will help to chart the emergence of the modern mass media.

This project will adapt and combine key research outputs from the Digital Transformations project 'The Audiovisual Essay: a digital methodology for film and media studies' into an 18-24 minute interactive 'VR essay film', comprising three episodes that explore the foundational role of framing, editing, and sound within the film-making process. Each episode will allow users to explore and think through one of the key paradigm shifts associated with rise of VR: the transformation of the letterbox frame into 360 degree space, the abandonment of continuity editing and montage, and the dissolution of the traditional 'sound mix' into an interactive binaural soundscape. The original project explored the use of digital video-making as a methodology for conducting research in the fields of film and media studies. In particular, it tested different ways in which the 'audiovisual essay' (or 'video essay') could complement traditional written scholarship on film and media to engage with digitally native audiences. The rise of VR over the last eighteen months opens radically new opportunities for the video essay to do so. This project explores the possibility of channeling the immersive power of VR for critical and educational ends, and in particular of using VR as a tool for communicating research on film and media to new audiences. By creating a VR essay film, the project will make possible a range of active dissemination and public engagement activities in collaboration with BFI Education. These will significantly augmenting the impact of the original project across three key groups of beneficiaries: new 18-30 year old cinemagoers, international VR creators, and the (so far latent) UK-based VR production sector. In doing so, this project follows Mark Zuckerberg's $2 billion gambit that VR provides one of the keys the future of screen media.

I am proposing to use the PhD position to research and develop solutions to overcome some of the challenges faced by Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) instruments when driven by optical sources emitting in the visible (VIS) spectral range, for imaging the human eye (more specifically the retina), in-vivo. The main advantage of developing VIS-OCT instruments is due to their diagnostic potential allowed by their improved lateral and axial resolution when imaging the eye compared to the technology currently used with near-infrared light sources. One of the challenges to be faced with using a visible range light source is the attenuation of light when the OCT imaging technique is applied in vivo and in particular, the eye. The biological tissue light must travel across the eye to reach the retina, is characterised by a quite large optical attenuation coefficient, and therefore the number of photons reaching the retina is low, and subsequently the images obtained are much poorer than those obtained using near-infrared light sources. Image quality is also affected by low levels of back-scattering of visible light on tissue, and the fact that a lower limit of optical power from the light source entering the eye is imposed in comparison to a near-infrared source which contributes to a large noise level in the OCT images obtained. Another aspect of the imaging technique which would be addressed is the way the image quality is determined by the use of camera-based OCT systems. Swept source OCT gives a better range of axial imaging in comparison to camera-based due to their narrow instantaneous coherence length. However swept sources are not available for the visible range and therefore this is an area where improvements need to be made to help the potential for visible light OCT to be used in new diagnostic technology. Addressing these issues to improve visible light OCT for biomedical imaging would enable us to produce high resolution images of the human retina (of the static tissue) and OCT angiography images of the micro-vasculature of the back of the eye. Researching the imaging technique would also allow development of an imaging instrument which is easier to build than those which do not use a visible light source, as well as the imaging method to provide potential for new spectroscopic techniques as a result.