Professor Rob Stone BA, PhD

• BA (Film and Art)
• PhD (Film and Literature)

Independence and empathy are central to Professor Stone’s understanding of the dynamics of global, national and regional film movements and their evolution. His publications on Spanish literature, film, surrealism and flamenco include Spanish Cinema (2002), Flamenco in the Works of Federico García Lorca and Carlos Saura (2004), The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (with Graeme Harper, 2007), Julio Medem (2007), Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema (with Lisa Shaw, 2012), A Companion to Luis Buñuel (with Julián Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla, 2013), Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History (with María Pilar Rodríguez, 2015] and Cine Vasco (with María Pilar Rodríguez, 2015). 

Professor Stone has published in English, Spanish and Italian. On American independent cinema his publications include Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (2013; second edition 2018) and Lady Bird: Self-determination for a New Century (2022). Recent writing that theorises 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), ‘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 Deborah Shaw on genre and gender in television include Sense8: Transcending Television (2021) and Sex Education: School’s Out for Netflix (2024).

His films include the documentary Some Stories (2018) and his works of videographic criticism have been published in [In]Transition and Tecmerin and been recognised by Sight & Sound as amongst the best of 2021 and 2022 with ‘Before The End’ having also gone viral. Professor Stone has contributed to special editions of films for Metro-Tartan (the films of Julio Medem), Criterion (The Before Trilogy) and Arrow (Boyhood). He has also written for Sight & Sound, Cinemascope, Time Out and many other magazines and journals.

Professor Stone has delivered over 50 keynotes and invited lectures, published over 40 chapters in edited works and over 35 articles in referred journals, and has supervised more than 20 research theses to completion. He is a member of the UKRI Strategic Review and co-directs B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film and Television Studies at the University of Birmingham. He has been awarded research grants by the AHRC, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the Mellon Foundation. He has been Associate Research Professor at the Universty of Deusto in Spain and in 2015 he was awarded the Chair of Basque Studies at the University of Chicago. In 2024 he will take up a Visiting Professorship at Brandeis University in the US.

I lecture on World Cinema, American and European Cinema, Film Authorship, and European and American Philosophy in relation to the politics and aesthetics of World Cinema.

I welcome enquiries about research supervision at MA and PhD level in relevant areas of World Cinema, American independent cinema, European cinema and genre and gender.

Find out more - our PhD/MA Film Studies page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Find out more - our PhD Film Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Professor Rob Stone researches on the dynamics of World Cinema, American independent cinema, Hispanic cinemas, Genre and Gender. In addition to the publications listed below, he produces works of videographic criticism.