Professor Helen Wheatley on death in film and television, corpses, grief and loss on screen, the Gothic, assisted suicide on television, haunting on TV and cultural trauma

The Death Studies Podcast

What's the episode about?

In this episode, hear Professor Helen Wheatley discuss death in film and television, corpses, grief and loss on screen, the Gothic, assisted suicide on television, haunting on TV and cultural trauma, as well as death in children’s television and live death on screen. Helen also discusses her extensive work with television archives and communities in Coventry, UK.

Who is Helen?

Helen Wheatley is Professor of Film and Television Studies and co-founder of the Centre for Television Histories at the University of Warwick.

She was also Director of the Resonate Festival, the Warwick Institute for Engagement’s year-long programme of events and activities for Coventry’s City of Culture year. Helen works collaboratively with archives and curators to engage the public with the history of British broadcasting, and has been awarded multiple prizes for impact/community engagement for this work.

Her most recent book, Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (IB Tauris, 2016) won the BAFTSS Award for Monograph of the Year in 2017.

Helen has research interests in various aspects of British television history, and has published work on popular genres in television drama in the UK, US, including the monograph Gothic Television (2006).

She has an ongoing interest in issues of television history and historiography, the topic of her edited collections Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (IB Tauris, 2007) and Television for Women: New Directions (Routledge, 2016, with Rachel Moseley and Helen Wood).

She is currently completing the monograph Television/Death for Edinburgh University Press (2023). This looks at the representation of death, dying, grief and bereavement, and at the posthumous image on TV.

How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists?

To cite this episode, you can use the following citation:

Wheatley, H. (2023) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 1 March
2023. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.22189924

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