1. Giannini was a populist politician who knew how to use new media to reach a broad and new public. We think populism is important today, both as a contemporary political movement to study, and as a movement with historical roots we can explore and explain.
Publications
So how much do I love interviewing interesting and passionate people about national film archives?
A whole LOT! With thanks to Devin Orgeron, editor of The Moving Image (University of Minnesota Press), for enabling this series of
Now out: The Art of Being Dangerous
In 2016 I was invited to contribute to a year-long celebration of female achievement. As the project leaders explained:
Celebrity reception
Exploring Celebrity reception in the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, Exeter, UK
Modernism on the World Stage
For roughly a century, Sarah Bernhardt's centrality to modernism has been largely ignored. Her inspiration and patronage of the twirling, tendrilic forms of Art Nouveau is often discussed in relation to her capacity for self-promotion and commercialization rather than as evidence of a pioneering performance style that subsequently helped drive...
My first Conversation article! But I am sorry that it is about the lack of access we have to our very own NFSA, as compared to the film archive in Milan, and the British Film Institute. I held interviews (on zoom) with the directors and curators of these archives, and it was fascinating to see what they made available to...
The Actress-Manager and Early Film
I authored this special issue on 'The Actress-Manager and Silent Film', with Vito Adriaensens (Columbia University) because I was tired of seeing actresses discussed as 'only' actresses, or stars, or women who looked good but were not (it is implied) working as strategic business women.
Archives and Archivists
What is lost and gained in the shift from physical to digital archiving? What and how do archives preserve, and how do they curate public access? How do we search for digital material? Which tools are used to modify and limit our search options, and what does this tell us about digital networks and our relationships to them? Who...
Women and the Silent Screen
Editor of Screening the Past, with Dr Susan Potter.
Award Winning Book
"Duckett's excellent skills as a researcher and a writer shine through. . . . Seeing Sarah Bernhardt therefore not only adds much needed context and analysis to the performances of the legendary Bernhardt, but it also shows the promise of intermedial research."--Theatre Journal
Letting Lolita Laugh
In my article for Film Literature Quarterly, I compare Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962) to Vladimir Nabokov's original 1955 novel. I argue that the film is not a weak copy of a famous novel but introduces Lolita through its own palimpsest of virtuoso parodic turns. I believe, therefore, that there is a conscious and clever humor in the way that ...
Georges Méliès: Satiric feminism
In my article "The Stars Might Be Smiling: A Feminist Forage into a Famous Film" (published in Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination : Georges Méliès's Trip to the Moon, ed. Matthew Solomon, SUNY, 2011), I argue that the humor of Méliès's A Trip to the Moon derives from the gendered comedy that his images set into play.