As Programme Director for Communications and Media at LCC, Dr Jonathan Wright is responsible for the academic leadership of the Programme and its day-to-day management. He has been teaching Media and Communication Studies, Cultural Studies and Film Studies at various UK universities for over the last 25 years. He originally studied for his Master’s Degree in ‘Film Studies’ at Southampton University and then went on to write his PhD thesis on Black British Cinema.
Jonathan teaches across the Communications and Media Programme, leading on units including: ‘Content for Creative Communications’ and ‘Media, Communications and Culture.’ He also supervises student research projects across the undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Jonathan leads on the development of pedagogics and creativity in the Communications and Media curriculum, which explores the relationship between creative practice and intellectual engagement in the student journey.
Jonathan has published on British cinema, race, and representation, and for a period wrote regularly for the political magazine Red Pepper. He has published various book chapters on race, cinema, and surveillance and on teaching ‘race’ in a university context. Jonathan has also published in the international film journal Black Camera about the film ‘Birth of a Nation’.
His current work explores the intersection between film theory and critical pedagogy. Jonathan is also engaged in a project about the Richard E. Norman drawing on archives at The University of Indiana, as part of an historical study of black film exhibition in the US in the early twentieth century.
Jonathan currently has PhD students working on social media engagement, and critical film practice, and he has two completions. His main subject areas for doctoral supervision include: the interrelationship between gender and sexuality in contemporary cinema; postcolonial theory and theories of space; race and the sociology of racial communities and the construction of black identities and ethnicity and national identity. As a theory-based academic he is very interested in the methodological issues involved in the supervision of practice-led research.
As part of Jonathan’s wider role at the University of the Arts London, he is the elected University College Union (UCU) Branch Secretary and Health and Safety Representative at the London College of Communication and is the elected UAL Co-Treasurer.
View the BA (Hons) Contemporary Media Cultures course page.
View the MA Media Communications and Critical Practice course page.