Dr Sarah Louise Smyth

Biography

Sarah Louise Smyth is a Lecturer in Film at the University of Essex. Before coming to Essex in September 2019, Sarah taught at the Universities of Southampton, Winchester and Bournemouth. Sarah's research focuses on women's representation and authorship in contemporary film and television. She is interested in feminist theory, especially feminist film theory; women's filmmaking and television production; postfeminism; pregnancy and motherhood; genre filmmaking. In 2025, Sarah was selected as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. This scheme selects a handful of the UK’s most outstanding early career researchers in the arts and humanities and helps them bring their research ideas to a broader audience on BBC radio. Selected from hundreds of applicants, these researchers represent some of the brightest emerging minds in their fields. As part of the New Generation Thinkers scheme, Sarah will be a researcher-in-residence at Radio 4's arts and culture programme, Front Row. Sarah's current book project examines the films of director, writer and journalist, Nora Ephron. Despite being one of the most successful women filmmakers in Hollywood of all time, Ephron's films have received little academic attention. This monograph will examine Ephron's contributions to women's filmmaking and Hollywood cinema, both in terms of her well-known and lesser-known films. The book, ReFocus: The Films of Nora Ephron, is currently contracted to Edinburgh University Press' series, ReFocus: The American Directors, and is due for publication in late 2026. As part of this project, Sarah has published the chapter "Nora, Julie, Julia: Legacies of Older Women in Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia (2009)," in Women, Ageing and the Screen Industries Falling off a Cliff (2023), published by Palgrave Macmillan. To support the research for ReFocus: The Films of Nora Ephron, Sarah won a BA/Leverhulme Small Grant to examine the screenplays of Ephron's early films, which are held in various archives and libraries in the USA. This project, titled "Beyond the Romantic Comedy: Women's Filmmaking, Genre, and the Early Screenwriting of Nora Ephron (1941-2012)" aims to show how Ephron contributed to genres outside of the romantic comedy through her screenwriting. The findings from this project will be published in Sarah's upcoming monograph. As well as women's filmmaking, Sarah also works on women's television production. She co-edited a special dossier on women's authorship and adaptation in contemporary television for New Review of Film and Television Studies (2024). As part of this special dossier, she published the article "Reese Witherspoon’s Popular Feminism: Adaptation and Authorship in Big Little Lies," which examines the feminist strategies Witherspoon deploys in her television programmes (and the limitations to those strategies). Sarah completed her PhD in Film at the University of Southampton in 2019. Her thesis examined representations of female subjectivity in contemporary British women's cinema. It was funded by the large AHRC project, Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary UK Film Culture. From her thesis, she published the article "Postfeminism, Ambivalence and the Mother in Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011)" in the journal Film Criticism (2020), and the chapter, “‘I do not know that I find myself anywhere’: The British Heritage Film and Spaces of Intersectionality in Amma Asante’s Belle (2013)” in Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (2021), published by Duke University Press. Sarah is also a member of Women's Film and Television History Network UK/Ireland (WFTHN) Steering Group. Sarah would welcome PhD applications in the following areas: • Women’s filmmaking • Women’s television production • Issues of gender and representation • Feminist film theory • British cinema • Genre cinema • Motherhood and pregnancy

Qualifications

• PhD University of Southampton,

• MA University of Sussex,

• BA University of Southampton,

Appointments

University of Essex

• Lecturer, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex (1/9/2019 - present)