Film and Television Studies

We understand Film and Television Studies as broad, multi- and interdisciplinary fields which we approach from the perspective of literary and cultural studies, e.g. by analyzing the specific medial forms and modes of (re-)narrating literary and cultural metanarratives, genres, and tropes. Focusing on issues of adaptation and representation, our work engages with current theories and discourses involving the fields of Shakespeare Studies, historical fiction/heritage, trauma and environmental studies.

Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV

In her new monograph, Christina Wald examines how Shakespeare’s plays resurface in current complex TV series, bringing together plays as diverse as The Tempest and Coriolanus with serial TV dramas like Westworld and Homeland. The comparative readings ask what new insights the twenty-first-century remediations may grant us into Shakespeare’s texts and, vice versa, how Shakespearean returns help us understand topical concerns negotiated in the series, such as artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of democracy, terrorism, and postcolonial justice. The dramaturgical seriality typical of complex TV allows insights into the seriality Shakespeare employed in structuring his plays. Discussing a broad spectrum of adaptational constellations and establishing key characteristics of the new adaptational aggregate of serial Shakespeare, the study seeks to initiate a dialogue between Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies, and TV studies.

Christina Wald, Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV(publisher's website)

Nostalgia, Trauma, Retrofuturism: Reframing History in Serial Neo-Period Drama

Susanne Köller’s doctoral research project is concerned with contemporary serial television drama’s utilization of and engagement with the genre of historical fiction in the context of increasingly complex and reflexive modes of storytelling characteristic of the medium’s trajectory towards ‘Peak TV’. The project observes and addresses what constitutes a novel approach to period drama, one that critically interrogates both the past itself as well as its emplotment in popular media narratives. In doing so, crucially, this new mode foregoes the overt aesthetics of historiographic metafiction, instead relying on the complex potential of accumulative seriality, a mode the study calls Serial Neo-Period Drama.

By looking at three series – Mad Men, Peaky Blinders, Halt and Catch Fire – and their reframing of the ubiquitous (and interrelated) literary/cultural theory concepts nostalgia, trauma, and retrofuturism, the project establishes that and discusses how such a neo-period mode has the potential to reflect and contribute to larger theoretical discourse(s) in various fields of study, thereby defining its cultural work in this respect as ‘doing history’ in a (post-)postmodern sense.

Susanne Köller, "'Just Little Bits of History Repeating' - The Historical Event, Seriality, and Accumulation in Mad Men" (full article)

Susanne Köller, "'I imagined a story where I didn’t have to be the damsel': Seriality, Reflexivity, and Narratively Complex Women in Westworld" (article preview)