Barbara is a media and film scholar with over a decade of teaching experience in higher education, including courses at London College of Communication (University of the Arts London), the University of Winchester and the Department of Film Studies at King’s, where she obtained her PhD. She has been teaching in the department of Digital Humanities since 2021 and now leads its Writing Lab ― a programme that offers sustained, personalised guidance throughout the academic year, helping students build confidence in their written work and build their academic skills.

Barbara is also an active researcher. Her publications include Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2020), the first monograph on the representation of fatness in cinema. She is currently investigating the use of humour in anti-Trump protest videos on TikTok.

Research and teaching interests

• The Body (fat studies, body image, body positivity, body horror)
• Gender (feminist media studies, masculinities)
• Media and politics (social media and politics, humour and politics)
• "Race"/ethnicity (Whiteness, "race" in the US context, the Othering of Eastern Europe in the West)
• Film/cinema (popular and genre cinema, representation)
• Online fandoms (fan works)

Selected publications

• Plotz, B. (2024). “Why is your body a different shape?” Fatness and Masculinity in the Superhero Film. Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, 13(1), 66-78. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2023.2170551
• Plotz, B. (2023). Eastern Europe as the Land of Horrors. In C.J. Miller & B. Van Riper (Eds.), Journeys into Terror: Essays from the Cinematic Intersection of Travel and Horror (pp.139-150). McFarland.
• Plotz, B. (2020). Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. Bloomsbury Publishing.