EUP 75: Our Publishing in Film Studies

by Gillian Leslie

Film Studies at Edinburgh University Press is one of the newer lists and was originally the Film, Media and Cultural Studies list. The decision to focus just on film, due to its potential as a publishing area, was taken in 2010 and resulted in rapid growth – we went from publishing 10 to 15 new film studies books each year to publishing over 40. In addition, we publish the Journal of British Cinema and Television four times a year, and Film-Philosophy, our diamond Open Access film journal, three times a year. In 2017, we began commissioning in Television Studies due to the innovative and exciting work in this discipline.

Although we publish across all areas of film and TV studies, in recent years we have focused particularly on American cinema, Asian cinemas, film-philosophy, and television theory. The important debates around gender and decoloniality currently being held within both disciplines are central to the books that we publish.

The majority of the books on the list are monographs or edited collections, but we have published a number of key textbooks as well, not least David Deamers’ Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images which offers students three different ways in which to approach these key texts within film-philosophy. Around half of our books are published within series, and we are particularly well-known for the Traditions in World Cinema series, and the twin ReFocus series: The International Directors and The American Directors. We publish one diamond open access series, Visionaries: The Work of Women Filmmakers, which EUP funds as part of our ongoing commitment to open access.

A number of our books have made a significant impact within their fields over the years, notably Linda Ruth Williams’ The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, Nikolaj Lubecker’s The Feel-Bad Film, and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz’s Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers. Death and the Moving Image by Michele Aaron won the Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book Award in 2015; Blood in the Streets by Austin Fisher won the 2020 BAFTSS Best Monograph award; The Janovics Center Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre Studies was won in 2023 by Agnieszka Rasmus for Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films and in 2024 by Daniela Berghahn for Exotic Cinema.

Over the next year or so, we will develop and launch a number of exciting new series, including 21^st Century Horror, Children’s Film and Television, Political Cinemas and Screening Sex. At the start of this year, EUP’s 75^th in business, we published Cinema, Culture, Scotland, an anthology of key works from Colin McArthur, one of the pioneering critics within Anglophone films. Edited by Jonny Murray, Colin’s writing career reflects the development of film studies within the UK, particularly Scotland. We hope that, in a similar way, EUP’s film and TV studies lists will reflect the very best of the innovative work being done in these disciplines.

The success of our film and television studies lists is completely down to our authors, book editors and series editors. We are honoured that they entrust us to publish their books, and our mission remains to serve them and their academic communities to the best of our abilities.