I’m Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Film and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham in the UK and I co-direct B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies. I started out as a Hispanist, having spent seven years living in Madrid, and my first academic works, written while I was at the University of Aberystwyth, were Spanish Cinema (Longman, 2001) and Flamenco in the Works of Federico García Lorca and Carlos Saura (Edwin Mellen, 2004). After moving to Swansea University in 2003 I wrote Julio Medem (Manchester University Press, 2007) and then my interest in American independent cinema and World Cinema took over. I co-edited The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (Columbia University Press, 2007) with Graeme Harper and then wrote The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run (Columbia University Press, 2013). This was followed by my co-authoring Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History (I. B. Tauris, 2015) and Cine Vasco: Una Historia Política y Cultural (2013, Fundación Social) with María Pilar Rodríguez while on a two-year Leverhulme major research fellowship. I returned from the fellowship to the University of Birmingham in 2014 (after having officially started in 2012) and co-edited Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2012) with Lisa Shaw, A Companion to Luis Buñuel (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) with Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, Screening European Heritage (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) with Paul Cooke, and Sense8: Transcending Television (Bloomsbury, 2021) with Deborah Shaw. The Routledge Companion to World Cinema (Routledge, 2017) was co-edited with Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison and Alex Marlow-Mann and the second, extended edition of The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run (Columbia University Press) was published in 2018.  I've published over 20 articles in academic journals and over 35 chapters in edited books on various aspects of World Cinema, been awarded research grants by the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust and the Mellon Foundation. In 2015 I was awarded the Koldo Mitxelena Chair in Basque Studies at the University of Chicago and in 2020 I was due to be Visiting Professor at Brandeis University until the pandemic hit. My research interests cover World Cinema, European cinema and independent American cinema with particular emphasis on the relations between aesthetics, politics and philosophy. I'm currently writing Lady Bird: Self-determination for a New Century (Routledge, 2022).