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Dr. R.S. (Rhys) Jones

Assistant Professor of Film, Media and Culture
Faculty of Humanities
Departement Mediastudies
Area of expertise: horror cinema, philosophies of disgust, critical theory, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, queer theory, abjection

Visiting address
  • Turfdraagsterpad 1
Postal address
  • Postbus 94550
    1090 GN Amsterdam
  • Profile

    My scholarship encompasses media theory and history, historical materialism, critical work on race and racialization, queer and decolonial theories, the history of affect, and radical formalist approaches to media. Broadly, I am interested in the ways socio-cultural production can be mapped against their political-economic determinants and effects through close formal analyses of critical theory and visual media.

    I am currently working on a monograph that provides a critical re-evaluation of psychoanalytic theories of abjection and their deployment in film and media studies via a close analysis of a range of media objects including case studies from horror cinema, speculative fiction, contemporary art and reality television. Situating cinematic and artistic representations of the monstrous and the disgusting within critical, cultural, and socio-political contexts, this work offers a new politically-orientated method of analysing abjection in media, literature and theory. My research has appeared or is forthcoming in LIT: Literary Interpretation Theory and The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, amongst other venues.

    Research Interests and PhD Supervision

    • Aesthetics
    • Critical theory (especially Marxism, decolonial scholarship, queer theory, and critical work on race and racialisation)
    • Film and Media Studies (especially popular culture and genre studies)
    • Literary Theory
    • Horror cinema / extreme cinema(s)
    • Histories of Settler Colonialism (especially North America and Australia)

    Teaching

    I teach classes on critical theory, media history and theory, and contemporary cinema including specialist topics such as ‘Queer Decolonial Approaches to Film Analysis’ and ‘Speculative Cinemas’. I am also the coordinator for the first-year core BA course ‘Media Aesthetics’.

  • Publications

    2023

    • Jones, R. S. (2023). Affect Theory. The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 31(1), 1-23.
    • Jones, R. S. (2023). Processes of Abjection: Toward a Marxist Theory of Horror. Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 33(4), 277-295. https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2166308

    2022

    This list of publications is extracted from the UvA-Current Research Information System. Questions? Ask the library or the Pure staff of your faculty / institute. Log in to Pure to edit your publications. Log in to Personal Page Publication Selection tool to manage the visibility of your publications on this list.
  • Ancillary activities
    No ancillary activities