Dr Louise Child

(she/her)

PhD

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

Louise Child is a highly interdisciplinary scholar whose most recent monograph 'Dreams, Vampires, and Ghosts: Anthropological Perspectives on the Sacred and Psychology in Film and Television' uses contemporary theories of animism to offer fresh perspectives psychology and society in popular screen narratives.  She has recently been awarded, with Dawn Collins, a grant from the Learned Society of Wales to build a research network around 'Animated Landscapes: Narrative and Engagement with Sacred Sites in Welsh and Global Contexts'.  She is the editor (with Aaron Rosen) of the collection 'Religion and Sight' and has published articles exploring the ways in which indigenous rituals, arts, and traditional storytelling are depicted and transformed within indigenous film and television.

Dreams, Vampires and Ghosts: Anthropological Perspectives on the Sacred and Psychology in Film and Television (in press and due for publication with Bloomsbury in August 2023).

Drawing from social theory and the anthropology of religion, this book explores popular media's fascination with dreams, vampires, demons, ghosts and spirits. Dreams, Vampires and Ghosts does so in the light of contemporary animist studies of societies in which other-than-human persons are not merely a source of entertainment, but a lived social reality.  Film and television programs explored include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twin Peaks, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Truly Madly Deeply and the films of Hitchcock.  Louise Child draws attention to how they both depict and challenge ideas and practices rooted in psychology, while quality television has also fascilitated a wave of programming that can explore the interaction of characters in complex social worlds over time.  In addition to drawing on theories of film from Freudian psychology and feminist theory, Dreams, Vampires and Ghosts uses approaches derived from a combination of Jungian studies and anthropology that offer fresh insights for exploring film and television.  The book draws attention to explicit and subtle ways in which cinematic narratives engage with myth and religion while at the same time exploring collective dimensions to social and personal life.  It advances new developments in genre studies and gender as well as contributing to the growing field of implicit religion using in-depth analyses of communicative dreaming, the shadow and mystical lovers in film and television.

Chapters

1. Dreaming: Anthropology, Psychology and the Study of Film and Television

2. Dreams as Detection: Trauma and Psychology in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock.

3. Animism, Anima and the Shadow in Twin Peaks

4. A Fairy Tale Heroine: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

5. Ghosts and Spirits: Ghost, Poltergeist and Afterlife

6. Dreams Reprise: Mad Love, Mesmerism and Mystical Participation in Heavenly Creatures and Bram Stoker's Dracula

7. Conclusion

Teaching

Louise Child is dedicated to inclusion and participation in learning and teaching and is particularly interested in co-creating learning communities that encourage a love of reading and that help students to develop their own critical voice.  She has a PGCert in University Teaching and Learning with a portfolio that focussed on the advantages and challenges of inter-disciplinary learning and teaching.  She has created several modules that are grounded in her interests in key questions around gender, ethics, the person and society and that draw from the anthropology of religion and narrative studies in film and literature.  Her teaching includes work on ritual, myth and narrative traditions in indigenous societies such as those of First Nations in Canada and the USA, Aboriginal Australia, Maori New Zealand, and African traditional religions. She also explores with students examples of mainstream popular culture that can be illuminated in fresh ways through the lens of religious studies, such as fairy tales, magic, vampires, and monsters.

Examples of modules (past and present)

Undergraduate

• Myth, Narrative and Identity: Storytelling and Society
• Projecting the Past: Popular Media and Heritage
• Emotions, Symbols, and Rituals: Studying Societies Through Film
• Bodies, Spirits and Souls: The Person, Ethics, and Religion
• Myth and the Movies

Postgraduate 

• Doing Ancient History Themes and Approaches
• Approaches to Myth, Narrative and Theory
• Myth, Religion and Contemporary Cinema

• I am available for PhD supervision in the areas of Narrative Film, Mythology, Indigenous Religions, and Social Theory and Religion

Supervisions

I am available for PhD supervision in the areas of Narrative Film, Mythology, Indigenous Religions, and Social Theory and Religion.

Past projects

I co-supervised Dr. Gina Bevan for a PhD titled: Pop! Medusa: The Appropriation of the Gorgon in Popular Music.