Routledge Advances in Film Studies
About the Book Series
This series is our home for innovative research in the field of film studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into this important and evolving subject area.
To submit a proposal for this series, please contact:
Suzanne Richardson, Commissioning Editor for Media, Cultural and Communication Studies
[email protected]
River Space in Contemporary Chinese Cinema: Home, Locality, and Waterbodies
1st Edition
By Mei Yang
September 30, 2026
River Space in Contemporary Chinese Cinema examines how filmmakers use river imagery to explore themes of home, displacement, and belonging in an era of rapid modernization. Using the term “river space” to describe geographical areas created by rivers or existing alongside them, the author shows ...
Animal Advocacy Documentaries in the Twenty-first Century
1st Edition
By Claudia Alonso Recarte
September 01, 2026
Animal Advocacy Documentaries in the Twenty-first Century is the first monograph dedicated exclusively to the study of this subgenre. The book explores how the plasticity of nonfiction film engages with nonhuman otherness and with the rhetorical discourses of advocates and activists, while ...
Cinema and the Dream of the Living Machine
1st Edition
By Joseph Zornado, Sara Reilly
August 24, 2026
Cinema and the Dream of the Living Machine offers a comprehensive critical history of artificial intelligence (AI) in Western cinema, tracing how films from Metropolis to contemporary science fiction transform technological anxiety into cultural fantasy. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, ...
India’s Women Filmmakers in the Age of Netflix: Female Lead
1st Edition
By Zeltzyn Rubi Sanchez Lozoya
July 13, 2026
This book uncovers the history of exclusion and erasure of women's work within the Mumbai film industry and highlights the challenges women face at every stage of filmmaking, from pre-production to distribution. Drawing on semistructured interviews with women and men working in the Mumbai film ...
Centring Women in Bollywood Biopics: Empowerment and Agency in Contemporary Indian Cinema
1st Edition
By Chandrava Chakravarty, Sneha Kar Chaudhuri
May 21, 2026
This book explores the dramatic rise in popularity of the women’s biopic in contemporary Bollywood, within the context of wider cultural shifts over the past decade. Delving into the societal shifts reflected in the genre, both on and off screen, the book explores the contours of individual agency ...
Eco-Teen Films
1st Edition
By Robin L. Murray, Joseph K. Heumann
May 21, 2026
Illuminating the impacts of environmental disasters and climate crises globally, this book examines the experiences of teens grappling with eco-disasters and issues in films of the twenty-first century. With an emphasis on teen activism, international settings and filmmakers, and marginalized ...
Posthumanism, Cognition, and Cyborg Spectatorship: Amalgamated Cinema
1st Edition
By Anna Batori
March 30, 2026
This book argues that contemporary digital blockbusters function as laboratories for posthuman cognition that transform spectatorship into a cyborg mode in which perception, memory, and agency are distributed across the cinematic canvas, the diegetic bodies of characters, the formal operations of ...
Narratives of Cultural Identity in Contemporary Arab Cinema: Voices from the Margins
1st Edition
By Hania A.M. Nashef
March 12, 2026
Narratives of Cultural Identity in Contemporary Arab Cinema examines emerging cinema from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and recent diasporic/transnational productions from the Levant. Although several books have been written on Arab cinema, there remains a need to consider the role of emerging...
African Documentary Cinema
1st Edition
By Alexie Tcheuyap
December 26, 2025
African Documentary Cinema investigates the inception and trajectory of contemporary documentary filmmaking in sub-Saharan African countries and their diasporas. The book challenges critical paradigms that have long prevailed in African film criticism, shedding light on the diverse discourses and ...
The Disaster Film as Social Practice
1st Edition
By Joseph Zornado, Sara Reilly
December 25, 2025
Surveying disaster films from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, this book explores the disaster film genre from its initial appearance in 1933 (The Grapes of Wrath, 1933) to its present-day form (Don’t Look Up!, 2021), laying bare the ideological unconscious at work within the genre. The ...
Place and the Moving Image: Experimental Film Practice as Topography
1st Edition
By Elisabeth Brun
November 06, 2025
Place and the Moving Image offers a rethinking of how experimental, essayistic film, engages with spatial knowledge and environmental awareness. At its heart is the concept of Moving Image Topography - a critical and artistic framework of thinking through the camera about the relationship between ...
Cinematic Starchitecture: The Celebrity Status of Urban Architectural Structures in Film
1st Edition
Edited
By Merrill Schleier, Paul Newland
November 03, 2025
Cinematic Starchitecture explores how examples of famous architecture have circulated throughout cinema history across diverse genres. Building on the term "starchitecture" – coined in 1997 for dramatic, monumental structures designed to gain international attention and economic advantage – the ...