The Past in Visual Culture: Essays on Memory, Nostalgia and the Media

In recent years digital technology has made available an inconceivably vast archive of old media. Images of the past--accessed with the touch of a finger--are now intertwined with those of the present, raising questions about how visual culture affects our relationship with history and memory.

This collection of new essays contributes to a growing debate about how the past and its media are appropriated in the modern world. Focusing on a range of visual cultures, the essays explore the intersection of film, television, online and print media and visual art--platforms whose boundaries are increasingly hard to define--and the various ways we engage the past in an environment saturated with the imagery of previous eras. Topics include period screen fiction, nonfiction media histories and memories, cinematic nostalgia and recycling, and the media as both purveyors and carriers of memory.

Jilly Boyce Kay is currently a Research Associate in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. Her work has been published in journals such as Feminist Media Histories, Critical Studies in Television, Social Movement Studies, and Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, as well as in a number of edited collections on media history, gender and television.

Cat Mahoney's work has been published in Frames Cinema Journal and she has presented at Television for Women: an International Conference, the Social History Society Annual Conference, and at the Cinema e Storia conference. She lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.

Caitlin Shaw's work appears in Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches. She lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom.