Joana Jacob Ramalho

I am an interdisciplinary scholar working across the fields of screen media, cultural studies, literature and language. My research focuses on intermedial representations of memory, displacement, and failure and is primarily concerned with recovering and uncovering neglected histories, figures, texts, and hermeneutics. Specialising in Gothic Studies, my research analyses the Gothic in its many iterations across media, national contexts, and historical moments. I am particularly interested in the ways traditionally marginalised individuals and underrepresented groups are depicted in works of fiction and in the ethical, political, and theoretical implications of such depictions. I have additional research interests in: Film (esp. classical Hollywood cinema, noir and musicals); alternative entertainment (particularly cabaret, burlesque, circus and 'freak shows'); gender politics in film, television and music; intermediality and generic hybridity; representations of mental illness in fiction; political in/correctness, and radical humour; Victorianism (esp. visual culture and mourning practices); and music (esp. film and stage musicals, and musical moments in non-musical films).

My monograph, Memory and the Gothic Aesthetic in Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), defines the cinematic Gothic as an aesthetics of memory and exile. Guided by three key concepts – memory, travelling, and touch – it proposes a reappraisal of the Gothic by redrawing its scope, retracing its origins, and refocusing attention on surfaces as sites of socio-political meaning. Central to the book's argument is the idea that the Gothic is marked by travels, migrations, and transactions. Specifically, it suggests that the cross-border movements of exiles, émigrés, and professional travellers had a crucial impact on the emergence, development, and dissemination of the filmic Gothic. This approach, which understands the aesthetic as a product of displacement, expands the canon to overlooked filmmakers and national traditions, and exposes the implications of uprootedness on the depiction of onscreen wanderers and outcasts.

I have published on haptic motifs and what I call ‘sensory contagion’ in gothic cinema; thing theory and creepy dolls in gothic and horror films; failure, décor leitmotifs, and Vincente Minnelli; portraits in 1940s psychological thrillers; gender politics in postmillennial gothic musicals; sexsationalist feminism; intermediality and radical humour in the repertoire of British punk cabaret trio The Tiger Lillies; and the queer failure and mock heroism of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. I have presented my work at several international conferences in the UK, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Austria and Portugal and am a peer reviewer for Canadian, US, and Polish journals.

I welcome proposals for PhD projects that focus on or overlap with any of the research specialisms above.