About us
The academic research team - Karen Lury (Principal Investigator) and Ryan Shand (Research Assistant) - are based at the University of Glasgow. The project, which will run for four years, originates from Karen’s interest in media representations of children and childhood and Ryan’s knowledge and expertise in the study of amateur film-making in Scotland. The academic research team will be working in close collaboration with the staff at the Scottish Screen Archive (part of the National Library of Scotland). Video material preserved and archived by the project will be stored at the Scottish Screen Archive and will ultimately be accessible to the public through the SSA’s online catalogue.
Professor Karen Lury
Karen Lury is Professor of Film and Television studies in the School of Culture and Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow and the Principal Investigator for the project. She is the author of two previous books on television (including British Youth Television: Cynicism and Enchantment) and more recently, a monograph entitled, The Child in Film: tears, fears and fairytales, published by I.B.Tauris. The book explores the powerful and frequently strange quality and presence of the figure of the child in a range of professional films made for an adult audience, including Japanese contemporary horror films, art films such as Pan’s Labyrinth and Mirror, as well as big budget Hollywood films such as Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, starring Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning. She has also written on children in contemporary Turkish and Iranian films, children’s television, camcorder based programmes such as the Teenage Video Diaries as well as the more recent representation of children in reality ‘parenting shows’.
In the 1980s Karen didn’t have a video camera but did have a truly terrible bubble perm. Unfortunately, this was later changed for a similarly appalling ‘Human League’ haircut. Since that time Karen has found a better hairdresser and has also had three daughters, all of whom would say that she is the one that’s ‘strange’.
Dr. Ryan Shand
Ryan Shand is the Research Assistant on the AHRC. funded project ‘Children and Amateur Media in Scotland’ at the University of Glasgow, U.K. He completed his Ph.D, which was titled ‘Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930-80)’, in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow.
Ryan studied for his M.Phil in Screen Studies at the University of Glasgow and his B.A. (Hons) in Film and Television Studies at Brunel University-West London.
His article ‘Theorizing Amateur Cinema: Limitations and Possibilities’ was published in The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and the chapter ‘Amateur Cinema Re-Located: Localism in Fact and Fiction’ was included in the edited collection Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).
Previously, Ryan worked as a Research Associate on the AHRC funded project ‘Mapping the City in Film: A Geohistorical Analysis’ at the University of Liverpool, U.K, from 2008-10.