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Will Brooker


Will Brooker is a writer and academic, professor of film and cultural studies at Kingston University and an author of several books of cultural studies dealing with elements of modern pop culture and fandom, specifically Batman, Star Wars and Alice in Wonderland.

Brooker completed his BA (Hons) in film and English studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 1991, and completed his PhD in cultural studies at Cardiff University in 1999. The title of his thesis was "One Life, Many Faces: The Uses and Meanings of the Batman, 1939–1999". Brooker also completed a postgraduate diploma in communication at Goldsmiths, where he is now recognised as one of a select group of notable alumni.

Brooker has worked at Kingston University since 2005. From 2005 until 2007 he was senior lecturer and field leader for film studies, and from 2007 until 2009 he served as principal lecturer and director of studies for film and television. He was promoted to reader in 2009 and professor in 2013. He is currently the director of research of Kingston's Film and Television Department. On 1 January 2013, Brooker became the first British editor of Cinema Journal since the publication was established in 1967. His five-year term will run until 31 December 2017.

Brooker's first major monograph, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon, was published in 2001. The book is a series of essays on the comic book superhero Batman, an expansion of Brooker's PhD thesis. The essays are each centred on a different period of Batman's history, drawing out the key elements that differ from period to period, as well as those that remain constant. Entertainment Weekly describes Batman Unmasked as "cutting through the mumbo jumbo...to deliver incisive analysis and very sharp reporting." Brooker engages with the major dialogues surrounding the topic, including the question of Batman's role as a patriotic figure, questions of his sexuality and the role of Batman as a viable queer text, to the point where Popmatters refers to it as "less an analysis of the Batman than a repudiation of a number of other texts that support DC's "official" reading of the character".

Brooker went on to publish Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans in 2002, Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture in 2005 and The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic in 2006. More recently, he has written the BFI Film Classics edition Star Wars, which received positive reviews in Empire magazine and The Guardian.


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