Emeritus Professor Rob Stone’s investigates the dynamics of global, national and regional film movements and their evolution. He founded and co-directed B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film and Television Studies at the University of Birmingham from 2014 to 2024. He has published in English, Spanish and Italian.
His publications on Spanish literature, film, surrealism, and flamenco include Spanish Cinema (Longman, 2002), Flamenco in the Works of Federico García Lorca and Carlos Saura (2004), The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (Columbia University Press, 2007), Julio Medem (Manchester University Press, 2007), Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2012), A Companion to Luis Buñuel (Blackwell, 2013), Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History (Bloomsbury, 2015] and Cine Vasco (Comunicación Social, 2015).
On American independent cinema, his publications include Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (Columbia University Press, 2013; second edition 2018), Lady Bird: Self-determination for a New Century (Routledge, 2022) and the forthcoming Imagined Life: American Independent Cinema and Transcendentalism (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).
Recent works that theorise new frameworks for understanding the dynamics of World Cinema include The Routledge Companion to World Cinema (with Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison and Alex Marlow-Mann, 2018; second edition 2027), ‘World Cinema in Flux: Cinemas of Citizens, Cinemas of Sentiment’ (2018) and (with Luis Freijo) ‘World Cinema Between the Rock of the Unknowable and the Hard Place of the As Yet Unknown’(2021).
His co-edited works with Professor Deborah Shaw on genre and gender in television include Sense8: Transcending Television (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Sex Education: School’s Out for Netflix (Bloomsbury, 2024) and several related articles.
He is also a filmmaker and video essayist. His films include the documentary Some Stories (2018). His works of videographic criticism have been published in [In]Transition, Tecmerin and the Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies and they have been recognised by Sight & Sound as amongst the best of 2021 and 2022 with ‘Before The End’ having also gone viral.
He has also contributed to special editions for Metro-Tartan (the films of Julio Medem), Criterion (The Before Trilogy) and Arrow (Boyhood), and has also written for Sight & Sound, Cinemascope, Time Out and many other magazines and journals.
He has delivered numerous keynotes and invited lectures around the world and has published many chapters in edited works and articles in refereed journals. He has also supervised more than twenty research theses to completion and served as a member of the UKRI Strategic Review. He has been awarded research grants by the AHRC, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the Mellon Foundation.
Having been awarded Emeritus Professor status by the University of Birmingham in 2025, he continues to work on various projects including the forthcoming Imagined Life: American Independent Cinema and Transcendentalism for publication by Edinburgh University Press in 2026. He also works on the editorial and advisory boards of Transnational Screens, the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and the Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies. He is Associate Research Professor at the University of Deusto in Spain and in 2015 he was awarded the Chair of Basque Studies at the University of Chicago. He continues to develop research links with the University of Zaragoza in Spain, where his qualifications are recognised by ANECA.