Dr Katie Barnett

Research Interests

My research focuses on representations of gender and the family in Hollywood cinema and American television. My own studies fostered a fascination with American culture, and I became particularly interested in how visual culture represents the values, ideologies and anxieties of a nation. Images of the family are ubiquitous in popular culture, and can reveal a lot about the time and place they emerge from. This has led me to do a variety of research around images of fatherhood and masculinity, from examining the stardom of Robin Williams to constructions of adolescent masculinity in Freaks and Geeks and images of boyhood and death in Hollywood cinema.

Latest / Proudest Achievement

In September 2018, in collaboration with a colleague at the University of Worcester, I organised and held the inaugural ‘Siblings on Stage and Screen’ symposium. We invited speakers from across the UK, as well as India, Canada, Brazil and the USA, to participate in the event, which focused on representations of sibling relationships in a variety of media, including cinema, television, medical literature, drama and poetry. We also held a short film screening and poetry reading at the same event, examining the different ways sibling bonds might be expressed through forms of media. This was the first gathering of scholars specifically focused on images of siblings, and it was extremely rewarding to bring people together across disciplines and departments to forge new links and discuss new ideas in this under-researched subject area. In January 2021, we held a virtual conference at the University of Chester, again succesfully bringing together global scholars working on different aspects of sibling representation. 

Further information

I recently completed a monograph, Fathers on Film (due Autumn 2019 from Bloomsbury), which looks at representations of fatherhood in Hollywood in the 1990s.

Selected recent publications:

Barnett, K. (2020) Fathers on Film: Paternity and Masculinity in 1990s Hollywood. Bloomsbury.

Barnett, K. (2019) I’m (not) a girl: Animating experiences of adolescence in Bob’s Burgers. Journal of Popular Television 7:1, pp.2-23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jptv.7.1.3_1

Barnett, K. (2018) "On the Cusp: Exploring Male Adolescence and the Underbelly of High School in Freaks and Geeks." In Schober, A. and Olson, D. (Eds.) Children, Youth and American Television. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Children-Youth-and-American-Television-1st-Edition/Schober-Olson/p/book/9781138601185

Barnett, K. (2017) "It's Only Teenage Wasteland: The Home Media Revival of Freaks and Geeks." In Wroot, J. and Willis, A. (Eds.) Cult Media: Re-packaged, Re-released, Restored. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319636788

Barnett, K. (2015). 'Any closer and you’d be Mom': The limits of post-feminist paternity in the films of Robin Williams. In Abele, E. & Gronbeck-Tedesco, J. (Eds.) Screening Images of American Masculinity in the Age of Postfeminism. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498525848/Screening-Images-of-American-Masculinity-in-the-Age-of-Postfeminism