The Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the Moving Image at Kent (http://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/film/filmcentre/) sponsors the Melodrama research cluster, a cross-faculty group of academics who are interested in exploring ideas on this hotly-contested topic. Despite its seeming commonsense, obvious, and frequently pejorative, meanings, melodrama is, in fact, a much more contentious category than is often recognised. It generates disagreement and controversy between experts in the field about its definition, canon, and ideological purpose. Far from being discouraged by the contested nature of the term, the scholars in the melodrama group -although we work in different fields and on different projects, we all acknowledge that – unite in embracing the fact that “melodrama” prompts interrogation, and requires contextualisation.

All colleagues interested in melodrama are welcome to attend our meetings and seminars; our areas of research include:

* melodrama as a genre or mode within film, television, theatre and literary

texts

*melodrama’s interaction with other genres such as horror

* performing melodrama

* melodrama as a metaphor

* melodrama outside Anglo-American contexts

Playbill advertising Lady Don in LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET and THE COLLEEN BAWN at the New Theatre Royal, Brighton, 18 September 1869 From The University of Kent’s Special Collections

Playbill from The Theatre Royal Hull, 1850 From The University of Kent’s Special Collections