Professor Lisa Purse

My research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and the politics of representation in contemporary cinema. I have published widely on digital aesthetics and digital visual effects, and on the body and physicality in action cinema, including the post-conflict action film.  

I am the author of Contemporary Action Cinema (2011) and Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema, and have co-edited Action Cinema Since 2000 (2024), Mediating War and Identity: Figures of Transgression in 20th and 21st-century War Representation (2020) and Disappearing War: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World (2017). I have given interviews on digital aesthetics and cinema to Swedish and Canadian television production companies, and been an invited expert speaker at public-facing screenings and Q&A events at the Barbican, the BFI Southbank, and Oxford’s Ultimate Picture Palace. 

My interest in representation extends to screen industry production cultures. I lead an AHRC-funded Impact Accelerator Account project, Screen Industry Voices, which examines the challenges faced by UK freelancers and screen businesses to secure economic sustainability in a volatile market. I submitted interim data from the project as part of written evidence to the UK Parliamentary Inquiry on Film and High-End Television, and I am a member of the Screen Workforce Development Group (Berkshire Local Skills Improvement Plan).