Dr Iain Robert Smith

Iain Robert Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London.

He is author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and co-editor of the collections Transnational Film Remakes (with Constantine Verevis, Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Media Across Borders (with Andrea Esser and Miguel Bernal-Merino, Routledge, 2016). In 2018, he was selected as an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker.

He was the co-founder of the SCMS Transnational Cinemas scholarly interest group in 2012, and co-investigator on the AHRC-funded research network Media Across Borders (2012-).

He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2018-) and is on the Editorial Board of the journals Transnational Screens (2013-) and Intensities: Journal of Cult Media (2012-) and the book series ‘Global Exploitation Cinemas’ (2020-) and ‘Contemporary Cinema’ (2021-).

He received his PhD and MA in Film Studies (Distinction) from the University of Nottingham and his MA (Hons) in English Literature and Film Studies (First Class) from the University of Glasgow. Before joining King’s in 2016, Iain Robert Smith was Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Roehampton (2010-2016).

Research interests

• Transnational Cinemas post-1945
• Global Hollywood
• Popular Cinemas of Asia (especially India and Turkey)
• Film Adaptation and Remakes
• Cult, Exploitation and Horror Cinema

Iain Robert Smith is a specialist in transnational cinemas with an emphasis on the ways in which material is adapted across different national contexts. His first monograph, The Hollywood Meme (2016), challenged the predominant models of cultural globalisation that tend to position American popular culture as a hegemonic global force, by interrogating what precisely happens when Hollywood films are adapted and remade by other cultures. Subsequently, he has published two co-edited books and two journal special issues that have further developed and refined his work on transnational adaptation, and this research was also the basis for the £30,000 AHRC grant for the research network ‘Media Across Borders’ on which he was Co-Investigator and through which he collaborated with scholars from across Europe, Australia, India, Japan, South Africa, Turkey, and the USA.He is currently completing an edited collection titled Global Cult Cinemas: Decolonising Cult Film Studies (with Dolores Tierney and Shruti Narayanswamy, Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and is working on a research project into the global reworkings of Batman alongside a comparative history of the posters that were created around the world for Hollywood films.

Iain welcomes applications for PhD topics related to any of his research interests. For more details, please see his full research profile.

Teaching

Iain Robert Smith has taught on a broad range of topics including modules on film history, world cinema, film adaptation and cult/exploitation cinemas.

Expertise and public engagement

• Lead Organiser of the Turkish Film Remakes festival at The Cinema Museum, featuring newly restored and subtitled versions of the Turkish remakes of Star Wars, Star Trek, The Exorcist, Some Like it Hot, Spider-man and Death Wish. April 2022.
• Lead Organiser of the UK cinema tour of the restored version of Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (Çetin Inanç, 1982, aka Turkish Star Wars) with cinema screenings in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Halifax, Leicester, London, Worthing and Bristol. August 2018.
• Lead Organiser of the ‘Turkish Exorcist’ event for the Being Human Festival, November 2018.
• Lead Organiser of regular public film screenings at King’s College London including hosting director Q&As with Gülten Taranç, Piyush Roy and Cem Kaya.
• Co-Organiser of ‘Turkish Film Week’, King’s College London, 12-16 December 2018 and 24-30 April 2019.
• Founder of the ‘Remakesploitation Film Club’ and Lead Organiser of regular screenings of global popular cinema at The Cinema Museum since November 2016.

Selected publications

Books:

The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 188pps.

Transnational Film Remakes (co-edited with Constantine Verevis). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. 248pps.

Media Across Borders: Localising TV, Film and Video Games (co-edited with Andrea Esser and Miguel Á. Bernal-Merino). London: Routledge, 2016. 238pps.

Selected Journal Articles:

“So Foreign It’s Good: The Cultural Politics of Accented Cult Cinema,” Continuum 33:6 (Special issue on ‘So Bad It’s Good’ cinema, edited by James Macdowell and Richard McCulloch). (Winter 2019) pp. 705-716

“Theorising Cult Cosmopolitanism: The Transnational Reception of Bollywood as Cult Cinema,” Transnational Cinemas 7:3 (Spring 2017) pp.20-34