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.
Rob's books 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 co-edited with Graeme Harper (Columbia University Press, 2007), Julio Medem (Manchester University Press, 2007), Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema co-edited with Lisa Shaw (Manchester University Press, 2012), A Companion to Luis Buñuel co-edited with Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Blackwell, 2013), Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Cine Vasco (Comunicación Social, 2015), both co-writtten with María Pilar Rodríguez.
On American independent cinema, his books 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). In addition, Rob has chapters forthcoming on Euphoria in A24: Culture, Aesthetics, Identity edited by Kim Wilkins and Bruce Isaacs (EUP, 2027), and a chapter on Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, co-written with Jimmy Hay, in Re-Focus: The Films of Chloé Zhao (EUP, 2027), edited by Kiki Tianqi Yu.
Recent works that theorise new frameworks for understanding the dynamics of World Cinema include The Routledge Companion to World Cinema (co-edited with Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison and Alex Marlow-Mann, 2018; second edition 2027), which contains Rob's chapters ‘World Cinema in Flux: Cinemas of Citizens, Cinemas of Sentiment’ (2018) and 'World Cinemas in Flux Redux' in the revised version (2027). Rob has also co-written two new theorisations of the dynamics of World Cinema with Luis Freijo: ‘World Cinema Between the Rock of the Unknowable and the Hard Place of the As Yet Unknown’ in Transnational Screens (2021), and 'World Cinema as Multiverse' in World Cinema Theory (Bloomsbury, 2027).
His co-edited works with Professor Deborah Shaw on the interaction of genre and gender in television include Sense8: Transcending Television (Bloomsbury, 2021), which includes his chapter on the function of music in the Wachowskis' series, and Sex Education: School’s Out for Netflix (Bloomsbury, 2024) in which he writes on 'Complex Female Characters: The Makings of Maeve'.
Rob 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. His latest film, the 20-minute Passing, which was made in collaboration with Dr Jimmy Hay of the University of Bristol, will be screened on 7 October 2026 at a special event in Bristol's Watershed.
Rob has also contributed to special editions for Metro-Tartan on the films of Julio Medem (Vacas, Red Squirrel, Sex and Lucía) and a full-length commentary with Paddy Woodworth for the DVD of Medem's Basque Ball. He also participates in a 40-minute discussion with Dave Johnson on the Criterion edition of The Before Trilogy. For Arrow's 4K special edition of Linklater's Boyhood he contributed an essay and the two-part video interview with Linklater entitled 'Before and After Boyhood'. Rob has also written for Sight & Sound, Cinemascope, Time Out and many other magazines and journals.
Rob has delivered numerous conference papers, 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 PhD theses to completion and served as a member of the UKRI Strategic Review.
Having been awarded Emeritus Professor status by the University of Birmingham in 2025, Rob continues to work on various writing and filmmaking projects and he serves on the editorial and advisory boards of Transnational Screens, the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and the Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, where he is dedicated to integrating works of videographic criticism and is co-editing a special issue in 2027.
Rob has been 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.
His favourite film of all time is Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995) and his favourite recent film is Sentimental Value (Trier, 2025).