SEAN

REDMOND

ACADEMIC AND ARTIST

My research interests are in the areas of film and television genre, audience and reception studies, stardom and celebrity, and representations of whiteness.

I am currently working on two empirical research projects:

Memories that Make Us: Storying Italian Immigration to Victoria in the post-war period

This project intends to shine a light on the dominant cultural and social values that Italian migrants encountered on their arrival to Australia and their settlement in Victoria. This will enable us to curate a shared ‘past’ and create a living history for all generations to gather around and learn from. The project will result in a feature-length documentary, digital archive and website, and interactive exhibition, alongside archival reports and research articles.

The project is aimed at Italian migrants aged 70 and over, who migrated to Australia and settled in Victoria from 1945 onwards.

The Loneliness Room Project

on how art can assist with loneliness.

This wonderful book made me rethink loneliness. The loneliness room, which each of us can make our own embraces the isolation of loneliness and its creativity and regenerative potential. This creativity is manifest in the artistic expressions of art, photography, cinema literature poetry and music which frame the chapters. Beautiful stories of the routines of life from walking back alone after taking children to school, to inner city life, the alleys of Hanoi, are interwoven with artistic accounts. Loneliness rooms provide some escape from the constraints of poverty, social exclusion and patriarchy, but can also be chronic and compulsive. They are embodied and expressive; contemplative and scary; sad but joyous.

Professor Kath Woodward, Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, School of Social Sciences & Global Studies, Sociology, Open University, UK

"Upon its release, Todd Phillips’ Joker garnered critical acclaim, awards recognition, and massive box office. The super villain origin story also received criticism for its depiction of violence, mental illness, and toxic masculinity. In Breaking Down Joker celebrated screen studies scholar Sean Redmond enlists an impressive array of global scholars to better understand the film and its wider reception. Applying a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, including screen studies, psychology, and sociology, this collection captures, unpicks, and challenges the often-conflicting views on the controversial film. Few recent films merit this depth of scholarly analysis, and it is harder to imagine a more rounded understanding of Joker than that offered by this exciting new collection" - Associate Professor Liam Burke, author of The Comic Book Film Adaptation.

Starring Tom Cruise, Wayne State Press, 2021

Endorsements

About

“Sean Redmond’s first-rate edited collection offers detailed consideration of the most important roles in Cruise’s successful decades-long career. This wide-ranging volume also covers essential new ground for the analysis of contemporary Hollywood stardom. Its insightful cross-disciplinary examination of the star’s perpetual border crossing makes this book an unmissable read. Stars like Tom Cruise never seem to lose their shine. This book enables us to understand why.”

—Virginia Luzón-Aguado, Harrison Ford: Masculinity and Stardom in Hollywood

“Love him or loathe him, there is no denying that Tom Cruise has been one of the world's biggest movie stars for a long time. As such, he deserves serious scholarly attention, and this book provides it with fifteen smart essays that adroitly address just about every imaginable facet of the star's cultural, sexual, and symbolic resonance.”

—Gaylyn Studlar, author of This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age

“This is a book that star studies has wanted, even if we didn’t know it—a wide-ranging set of reflections on the desirability, authenticity, and dogged agelessness of contemporary Hollywood’s ubiquitous genre king. As equally attuned to the white, masculine normativity of Tom Cruise as to his performative excess, sexual indeterminacy, and spiritual eccentricity, this book advances star studies by elucidating a changing Hollywood landscape through the cultural continuity of its most tenacious star.”

—Misha Kavka, professor of cross-media culture, University of Amsterdam

“The contributors analyze Cruise’s appearance, his affect, the surrounding discourses, and films’ presentation of the actor in ways that illuminate the various aspects of his stardom and the society and industry that have made him a star for forty years.”

—Cynthia Baron, author of Denzel Washington