Plenary Speakers

The International Conference on the Image will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners.

Owen Evans Marijke de Valck
Dina Iordanova
Mario Minichiello
Solon Papadopoulos

Garden Conversation Sessions

Plenary Speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations – unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation. Please return to this page for regular updates.


The Speakers

Owen Evans

Owen EvansAfter completing his BA and PhD in German Studies at Swansea University, Owen Evans worked as a Lektor in the English Department of the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz before his appointment to a lectureship in German at the University of Wales Bangor in 1995. He returned to Swansea in January 2005 to teach in Media, with particular emphasis on Film Studies, before moving to the Media Department at Edge Hill University in February 2011 where he is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television.

His research interests embrace German film, literature and culture, European cinema, autobiography, and the representation of history and cultural memory. He has published on German literature, especially work from the former GDR and autobiography. His most recent monograph is entitled Mapping the Contours of Oppression: Subjectivity, Truth and Fiction in Recent German Autobiographical Treatments of Totalitarianism (Rodopi, 2006). His cinema work includes articles and chapters on topics such as Run Lola Run, The Lives of Others, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, German film comedy, the role of the film festival in Europe, and on the influential British film publication Sight and Sound. He has recently finished a major chapter entitled ‘Memory, Melodrama and History: The Return of the Past in Contemporary Popular Film in Germany’ for a collection on cultural memory in post-1989 Europe, and is currently working on a monograph on German cinema since 2000. He has won major grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).

He is co-founding director of the European Cinema Research Forum (ECRF), as well as co-founding editor of the international journals Studies in European Cinema and the new Journal of Popular European Culture, both published by Intellect.


Dina Iordanova

Dina IordanovaOriginally from Bulgaria, and having worked later on in Canada, the US and England, Professor Iordanova’s background is in philosophy and aesthetics. She joined St. Andrews as the University’s first Chair in Film Studies in 2004 and led the start of that Department’s dramatic climb up the research league tables to the best score achieved by a department in Scotland in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. She is the founder of the Centre for Film Studies and the publishing house St Andrews Film Studies. After chairing the Film Studies department and serving as a Director of Research for the top performing School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies, the University asked her to serve as a Provost of the ancient St. Leonard’s college, with responsibility for doctoral students.

Professor Iordanova has published extensively on transnational cinema, global film industries, and film festivals, as well as on Eastern European and Balkan cinema. In her work, she investigates film history in its socio-historical and mediatic context, paying particular attention to issues of comparative critical analysis of cross-cultural representation, cultural sensibilities and diverse identities. Lately she pioneered research into international film festivals and the dynamics of global film circulation. She is active on the international speakers circuit, has been a distinguished visiting professor at universities in the USA and across Europe and Asia, and is a recipient of multiple Rockefeller, Leverhulme and Carnegie Trust awards. Iordanova’s work has been translated into twenty languages and has been adopted for teaching around the world.


Mario Minichiello and Solon Papadopoulos

Mario MinichielloHurricane films are the invention of Solon Papadopoulos and Roy Boulter. Each partner has a wealth of experience from their highly successful individual careers. Sol’ conceived and directed two landmark television series for Granada and PBS America – broadcast in over forty other countries.

Roy enjoyed a successful music career as a member of The Farm. Roy turned to scriptwriting, gaining over a hundred and forty television writing credits including the BAFTA winning – series of Jimmy McGovern’s ‘The Street’ for BBC One.

For their social history series ‘MY WAR’ – Hurricane films approached Professor Mario Minichiello an award winning international practitioner and academic – Minichiello’s work for ‘MY WAR’ produced a unique series of narrative imagery. The critical research that lead to this work reflects how drawing remediates the experiences and narratives of others.
Solon Papadopoulos
The value of this imagery is that it simultaneously borrows from the experiences of the storyteller and the artists own imaginative response.

This use of a drawing language as the primal, direct form of expression to remediate experience, places the viewer at the heart of the narrative. This form of narrative drawing in journalistic contexts operates as a means to convey what might not be captured photographically or text.

It is this experience that forms the plenary and final talking circle at this conference with both Mario and Sol.


Marijke de Valck

Marijke de ValckMarijke de Valck studied Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Utrecht University. She graduated cum laude with a thesis on transmedial storytelling in film, television and new media. After having worked two years for an internet company, she joined the University of Amsterdam to conduct her Ph.D. on international film festivals, which she completed cum laude in 2006. Afterwards she taught courses in the film programme and the MA programme Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image at UvA, while working on a CMI-studies (communication, media and information) project for the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Marijke now works as an assistant professor in the department of Media Studies. In 2009 she received the Boekman Disseratieprijs for her Ph.D.

Together with Skadi Loist, Marijke founded the Film Festival Research Network (FFRN). The FFRN is a lose connection of scholars working on issues related to film festivals, and aims to make festival research more available and connectdiverse aspects and interdisciplinary exchange between researchers. A subgroup of the FFRN is the Film Festival Research Network work groupwithin the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). Together with Skadi, Marijke compiled and published the first annotated, themed bibliography on film festival research, available online.