St John's College Cambridge CB2 1TP United Kingdom
Jules O'Dwyer is a Teaching Associate in Film Studies and French. He gained his PhD from Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 2021 and previously held a Research Fellowship at St John’s College. His research interests include French and Francophone cinema, queer studies, film theory, and spatial approaches to visual media and contemporary thought.
He is the author of two books exploring questions of space and place in the cinema: The Seduction of Space: Cruising French Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) and Hotels (Fordham University Press, 2025). More broadly, his work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in journals including Screen, Discourse, Yale French Studies, and several edited collections.
Jules is currently embarking on a new project that will expand his long-standing interest in cinematic space in new directions by exploring how French and Francophone filmmakers and theorists have historically engaged with, and increasingly sought to politicize, the porous boundaries between the cinema, the museum and the art gallery to negotiate questions of cultural difference. A Studies in French Cinema/BAFTSS prize-winning essay pertaining to this project was published in Screen in 2017.
Dr. O’Dwyer is currently co-editor of world picture and is a podcast host at the New Books Network.In the 2024/2025 academic year, he convenes the undergraduate course, CS7: Cinema and the Political; the optional MPhil module FSS Spaces: Gender, Sexuality, and Space; and co-teaches the MPhil Core Course, Theorising Moving Images. He also contributes lectures to CS6: European Cinema, and FR1: Introduction to French literature, film and thought.
Monographs
The Seduction of Space: Cruising French Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, March 2025), 248 pp.* https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517916848/the-seduction-of-space/
Hotels (New York: Fordham University Press, April 2025), 144 pp.* https://www.fordhampress.com/9781531509644/hotels/
Articles
“Langue de Bois: Queer ecologies on the margins of Paris,” Yale French Studies 147 (Forthcoming in issue on “Strange Landscapes”)
‘Le lieu de drague comme lieu de mémoire, or Cruising, Cinema, and Colonial Vestiges’ in Queer Realms of Memory: Archiving LGBTQ Identities in the French National Narrative, ed. Provencher et al. (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming)
“Hotel Film and the Erotics of Adjacency,” World Picture, 15 (Winter 2024)
‘From the Story of an Eye to Corporeal Cinema’ in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, ed. Todd Reeser (New York: Routledge, 2022): 237-246
‘Enduring extremity: on Isabelle Huppert’s intertextual body’ in Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship, eds. Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021): 79-98.
‘Coming and going: Nolot, Barthes and the Porn Theatre’, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 42:3 (Fall 2020): 259-280.
‘Reframing the spaces of French cinema’, Studies in French Cinema, 19:2 (2019): 165-169.
‘The cinematic Rorschach’ in Stains: Communication and Contamination in French Culture, eds. Zoe Angelis and Blake Gutt (Oxford: Lang, 2019): 69-84.
‘Histoire(s) de l’art: the queer curation of Vincent Dieutre’, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 16 (Winter 2018): 53-66.
‘Reorienting objects in Marker and Resnais’s Les Statues meurent aussi’, Screen, 58:4 (Winter 2017): 497- 507.
And review essays for Film-Philosophy, French Studies, Studies in European Cinema and Modernism/modernity.
