Dr Richard Hewett

Biography

Dr Richard Hewett is Senior Lecturer in Contextual Studies for Film and Television at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Since his arrival in 2021 he has created the Screen Cultures: Factual Stories unit, and re-worked the Screen Cultures: Narrative and Screen Cultures: Screen Performances and Genres units on the BA (Hons) Film and Television degree. Richard previously lectured at the University of Salford, where he created the British TV Fictions, Media Texts and Dissertation modules on the the BA (Hons) Television and Radio Production programme. Other work includes lecturing at the University of Nottingham and Royal Holloway, University of London, where he supervised dissertations, created the Television Aesthetics module and lectured on the International Broadcasting MA. He has also worked as an MRes External Examiner at the University of Nottingham.

Richard completed his BA (Hons) Degree in Creative Arts at MMU Cheshire in 1995, before taking a Masters Degree in The History of Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2009. His PhD, 'Acting for Auntie: From Studio Realism to Location Realism in BBC Television Drama, 1953-2008', was submitted to the University of Nottingham in 2012. This employed a combination of archive research into both production and reception, original interview material with key creatives and close textual analysis to examine changes in small screen performance from the live era to the present day. In particular, Richard focused on the influence of changes in production context (the move from multi-camera studio to single camera location work) and actor training at UK drama schools.

His first book, The Changing Spaces of Television Acting, was published by Manchester University Press in 2017, and was reviewed in Critical Studies in Television 13(4) as making 'an invaluable contribution to current research' (Lacey, 2018: 521); a paperback edition followed in 2020. Richard has also conducted research into screen comedy and television and radio adaptation, contributing articles to The Journal of British Cinema and Television, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Critical Studies in Television, Adaptation, Series – International Journal of Serial Narratives, and Comedy Studies. He has been invited to contribute chapters to Exploring Television Acting (2018), Twelfth Night: An Adventure in Time and Space with Peter Capaldi (2019), Moments in Television: Sound/Image (2022) and Screen Storytellers: Russell T Davies (forthcoming), and four of his outputs were included as part of the University of Salford's UoA34 REF2021 submission,

He has peer-reviewed journal articles for Critical Studies in Television and Adaptation, in addition to monographs and book proposals for Bloomsbury and Manchester University Press. He was also Assistant Book Reviews Editor for Critical Studies in Television between 2017 and 2021.

Conference papers include International Screen Studies, University of Glasgow, and a keynote at Playing the Small Screen, University of York.

Industry experience includes work as a runner, researcher and supporting artist.

Richard is currently working on his second monograph, Fantastic Acting in Science Fiction Television: Non-Naturalistic Performance in Doctor Who and Star Trek, for Bloomsbury Academic.