Jules O’Dwyer is Lecturer and Early Career Development Fellow in Film Studies at King’s College London. His teaching and research interests include gender and sexuality, film theory, art and experimental cinemas (esp. French and Francophone), and spatial approaches to screen media. He gained his PhD from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and he subsequently held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, followed by posts at Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin.

Jules is the author of two books. His first monograph, The Seduction of Space: Cruising French Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), which was awarded Best First Book awarded by British Association for Film, Television and Screen Studies, considers contemporary French queer cinema through the analytic prism of spatial theory. His second book, Hotels (Fordham University Press, 2025), which appears as part of the Cutaways series, places a global array of cinematic practices into dialogue with film theory and media history to understand why the hotel has such a strong purchase on the cinematic imaginary. He is currently working on a third book on French cinema and the museological imaginary.

More broadly, his work has appeared in journals such as Screen, Discourse, Yale French Studies, and several edited collections. He currently serves as co-editor for world picture.

Research interests

• Art cinema (esp. French and Francophone)
• Gender, Sexuality and the Body
• Film Theory
• Film and the Other Arts
• Spatial approaches to visual media

Teaching

O’Dwyer has taught courses on documentary cinema, avant-garde and experimental media, queer film and women’s filmmaking, French cinema, as well as film history and theory.

Expertise and public engagement

O'Dwyer’s work benefits from public engagement. He has previously run workshops and conversations with eminent queer filmmakers, Christophe Honoré and Karim Aïnouz, and has delivered research talks at the National Gallery, London and The Garden Cinema. As a key member of world picture, a collective of film scholars working across Canada and the UK, he has co-organised the journal's European conferences with colleagues at Universities of Cambridge and Amsterdam, as well as the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin.

Selected publications

• The Seduction of Space: Cruising French Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025)
• Hotels (New York: Fordham University Press, 2025)
• “Coming and going: Nolot, Barthes, and the Porn Theater,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 42: 3 (Fall 2021): 259-280.
• “Enduring extremity: On Isabelle Huppert’s Intertextual Body,” in Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship. ed. Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 79-98
• “Reorienting objects in Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s Les Statues meurent aussi,” Screen 58: 4 (Winter 2017): 497-507