Supervisor: Dr Michael Witt

Gillian McIver received her PhD from Roehampton University in the Media Culture and Languages department, specialising in Art History and Cinema Studies. Her area of research addresses the relationships between cinema, material culture and art history in visual culture and retinal communication. Her current research looks at Egyptian cinema, and she is working on the idea of abstraction as visual language in cinema practices.

Her PhD examined the historical film and its relationship to art history and visual storytelling. ‘When investigating the artistic representation of historical events. I noticed the tension between the accepted rhetorical mode for history (accurate, neutral and detached) and art’s passionate and emotive accounts. We can call these two approaches the realist and the sublime. My research demonstrates how art and cinema use this tension to engage audiences but also to pass on values and ideological positions.’

Gillian McIver is the author of Art History for Filmmakers: The Art of Visual Storytelling (Bloomsbury 2016).