Â鶹ÊÓƵ

My teaching and research interests focus on European and World Cinemas, with a particular emphasis on Turkish German Cinema and other migration and diaspora cinemas in Europe, as well as West Asian cinemas, especially of Turkey and Iran. My specialisms also include film theory and philosophy, alternative and cult cinemas, gender and sexuality studies, contemporary screen cultures and the questions of work migration and global politics.

Before joining Leicester in 2016 I taught film gender and media studies at the University of Manchester and University of Lincoln. I hold a PhD from Manchester University, an MA in Film Studies from Anglia Ruskin University and a BA in Comparative Literature from Istanbul Bilgi University.

I am a member of the editorial board for Film International, and currently serve on the UKRI Talent Peer Review College.

I am currently working on my second monograph, Outsider Cinema: Negative Aesthetics and Politics in Contemporary European Diasporic Film, which explores how negative affect in film can activate new forms of political imaginaries. This book examines five contemporary directors whose diasporic backgrounds inform their cinematic engagement with otherness. Focusing on horror and crime genres, it analyses how negative aesthetics and affect are mobilised to challenge dominant ideologies. Rather than embracing nihilism, these films channel negativity and pessimism into productive political critique and refusal. Drawing on contemporary theories of negation, Outsider Cinema argues that negative affect can operate as a positive force for envisioning alternative futures.

My first monograph Post-unification Turkish German Cinema: Work, Globalisation and Politics beyond Representation (2018) explores both fiction and non-fiction films that address labour migration from Turkey to Germany. Engaging with materialist philosophies of process, it analyses films by Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, Aysun Bademsoy, Seyhan Derin, Harun Farocki, Yüksel Yavuz and Feo Aladag. Shifting the focus from the longstanding concerns of cultural conflict, integration and identity, I demonstrate that these films offer new expressions of lived experience under late capitalism through themes of work, labour, social reproduction, unemployment and precarity. I argue that such a methodological shift can conjure up the political potential of affect in these films.

A review of my book Post-Unification:
Irwin, M. (2021) “Post-unification Turkish German cinema: work, globalisation and politics beyond representation”, Transnational Screens, 12(1), 88-9, DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2020.1839299

An interview with me on Turkish German Cinema (in Turkish language):
Torun, A. (2021). “Göçün 60. yılında Türk-Alman Sineması: Gözde NaiboÄŸlu ile Röportaj.” Göç Dergisi, 8(3), 497-506. https://doi.org/10.33182/gd.v8i3.802

Monograph

2018   (Palgrave Macmillan).  

Book Chapters

2024 ‘The politics of pessimism and negative futurability in Fatih Akin’s In the Fade (2017)' in Olivia Landry and Claudia Breger (eds), , Camden House.
2024 (forthcoming) ‘Berlin Stool: Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism, Affective Pessimism and Abjection in Dogs of Berlin’ in Joseph Twist (ed.), , German Monitor Series, Brill. 

Journal Articles and Interviews

2022 '' Feminist German Studies, 38(1) Special Volume edited by Angelica Fenner and Barbara Mennel: (Post)Feminist Practice in German Cinema: Between Ambivalence and Ambition.
2018 ‘’, Feminist Media Studies, 18(3).
2014 ‘’, Studies in European Cinema, 11(2), pp. 106-115.
2011 ‘Interview with Felicity Colman on Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts (Berg, 2011)’, Actual/Virtual: Journal of Practical and Creative Philosophy, 13. ISSN: 1752-5654
2010 ‘Sameness in Disguise of Difference: Gender and Identity in Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand and Auf der Anderen Seite’, German as a Foreign Language, Issue 3/2010, pp. 75-98.  ISSN 1470 – 9570

Book Reviews

2015 ‘’ Screen, 56 (2).
2013 ‘Post-Wall German Cinema and National History: Utopianism and Dissent by Mary O’Brien. New York: Camden House, 2012’, Film Criticism, 37 (3), pp. 163-166. ISSN 0163-5069

I am currently supervising theses on political affect in contemporary British film and television, as well as Asian genre cinemas. 

I welcome enquiries from prospective students in areas including:

European and World Cinemas

Turkish German cinema and television

Migration and Diaspora Cinemas

Film theory and philosophy

West Asian cinemas (particularly Turkish film and television)

Alternative/cult cinemas

Negative affect in film

Cinema and the questions of work, migration, and global politics 

Undergraduate

• HA1202 Introduction to Film History II
• HA2030 Researching World Cinema
• EN3035 Weird Fiction/Weird Film
• HA3489 Watching the Detectives: Crime on the Page and Screen
• HA3401 Dissertation

I also contribute to teaching and supervision on other modules including HA2227 Video Essay and HA1307 Reading Film.

Postgraduate

• HA7203 Approaches to Textual Analysis

European Cinema and politics

Turkish German Cinema

Turkish and German cinemas

Film theory and global politics

Invited Research Talks

'Migration film and the radical media ecologies of the 1970s and 1980s.' Cinepoetics Centre for Advanced Film Studies, Audiovisual Practices of Instable Archives Workshop, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. December 2023.

Respondent to the Keynote Speech by Deniz Gokturk, New Perspectives in Turkish German Cinema Conference, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. May 2023.

'The politics of pessimism and negative futurability in Fatih Akin's In the Fade (2017), George Washington Wilson Centre for Art and Visual Culture Seminar Series, The University of Aberdeen, UK. January 2022.

'Gendered Subjectivity and Neocolonial Encounters in Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann and Valeska Grisebach's Western' Annual German Studies Symposium, University of Toronto, Canada. May 2019.

'Capturing Work and Invisible Labour in Turkish German Documentary,' University of Westminster, CREAM Research Seminars. June 2018.

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)

Ph.D University of Manchester

M.A. Anglia Ruskin University

B.A. Istanbul Bilgi University