Anthony Paraskeva

PhD (Cambridge)

MPhil (Glasgow)

BA Hons (Cambridge)

I specialise in twentieth and twenty-first century literature, cinema and theatre. My first monograph, The Speech-Gesture Complex, explores the relations between language and gesture in modernist literature, performance, and silent cinema. My second book, Samuel Beckett and Cinema, is a critical study of Beckett’s long-standing interest in cinema, situating him in the film culture of the twenties and thirties, and second wave post-war modernism.

My research interests include modernism, literature and film, new media, styles of acting, screenwriting, montage, the film essay, gesture, silent cinema, the nouvelle vague, theatricality.

I am currently working on a book-length project on the relations between film editing and literary technique, together with an accompanying film essay, an edited collection on performance practice and moving image research, and projects on Byzantium and modernism, and soundsystem culture.

I am also a practicing filmmaker, and have recently completed the first stage of post-production on a feature film I wrote and directed, Exit Medea.

I welcome applications from research students wishing to study in any area of modernism, cinema, media, theatre, screenwriting, including creative PhDs.

In June 2022, Voices of the Cassel was awarded BIG South London Hothouse funding. 

The project is a partnership between myself as academic lead, The Cassel Hospital (an NHS psychiatric hospital in Richmond, which counts Virginia Woolf's psychiatrist, Maurice Craig as one of its founders), the Hospital Trust, oral historians On the Record, and various arts, mental health and voluntary sector groups. The project will pilot new voluntary and third sector services based on research into the Cassel's 100-year archive, in collaboration with co-researchers drawn from Cassel ex-patients and staff and other voluntary sector groups. 

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Modernist Studies Association

British Association for Modernist Studies

Samuel Beckett Society

Screenwriting Research Network

British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS)

British Film Institute

British Universities Film and Video Council

Film London

I have taught across the full range of undergraduate modules in English, including London in Literature, Literature and Media, Modernist and Post-War Literature, Literature and Cinema, Dissertations. I also teach Creative Writing modules including Visual Storytelling, and Rewriting London. I am part of the teaching team on the Creative Writing MA dissertation and the English MA in Popular Literature and Culture, and the co-supervisor of Alastair Sherwood’s AHRC/Techne-funded PhD Slapstick Before Cinema: Comedy and Pain in 19thC Literature.