Contact Details

Dr. Dan North
	Department(s): English
	Room: 305 (Queen's Building)
	Telephone: +44 (0)1392 262452 (Internal Ext. 2452)	This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
	CV for Dan North. (Adobe Acrobat™ file format – opens in a new window)

Research Interests

• Film technology;
• special effects;
• contemporary British cinema;
• animation;
• puppetry/animatronics in film;
• early film: invention and reception;
• history of magic and illusion.

Most of Dan North's work is concerned with issues raised by special effects technologies in film. His PhD thesis 'Special Effects and the Aesthetics of Illusion' connects discourses around 19th Century magic theatre and the reception of early cinema to the development of sophisticated mechanisms for the production of visual illusions up to the present day. A monograph on the subject of special effects, drawn in part from this research, will be published by Wallflower Press in 2008. Future projects will examine the importance of puppetry (marionettes, automata, animatronics and stop motion animation) in film and TV. 

Prior to his appointment as a lecturer in Film Studies, he was employed by the School of English as a research fellow working with papers donated to the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture by the British film-maker Don Boyd. This extensive archival project produced a preservational space and online database for several thousand items of interest to scholars of British cinema, and he is about to publish a collection of essays by leading British cinema scholars on unfinished British films. This project will foreground the role of archival materials in recovering
incomplete film texts and rendering them valuable to historians as cultural moments.

Publications

Most Represenatative Publications 

• Performing Illusions: Magic, Special Effects and the Coming of the Virtual Actor, London: Wallflower Press, forthcoming January 2008.
• Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming 2007
• 'Illusory Bodies: Magical Performance on Stage and Screen in Early Popular Visual Culture, July 2007. 
• ‘Kill Binks: Why the World Hated its First Virtual Actor' in Culture, Identities and Technology in the Star Wars Films, Carl Silvio & Tony Vinci (eds.) McFarland, 2007
• ‘Virtual Actors, Spectacle and Special Effects: Kung Fu Meets "All That CGI Bullshit"' in The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded, Stacy Gillis (ed.) Wallflower Press, 2005
• 'From Android to Synthespian: The Performance of Mechanical Life' in Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, John Plunkett & James Lyons (eds.) University of Exeter Press, 2007.