My research focuses on the role of cinemas in British twentieth-century society. In particular, I am researching how cinemas operated as sites of public emotion and how their spatial characteristics contributed to a permissive and distinct emotional economy far-removed from the cliché of the British stiff-upper-lip.
The research explores how and why cinemas became emblematic of a particular modernity which asserted the importance of leisure in the lives of millions, and how this contributed to conceptions of modernity. The research seeks to explore how local experiences can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of cinemas (and of cinema-going in Britain as a whole) in the first half of the twentieth-century.
