Profile

Portfolio

As Dean, Duncan oversees the work of the University’s eight Arts and Humanities Departments and related Centres and Institutes in relation to their teaching, research, management, finance and human resources and he represents the Faculty within and beyond the University.

He chairs Faculty committees, including the Faculty Board, the Faculty Executive Group and the Faculty Learning and Teaching Group.

Biography in brief

Duncan is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, where he completed an MA (First Class Hons.) in Sociology in 1986 and a PhD thesis, ‘Making Movies: The Structuring of Creativity in Contemporary British Cinema’ in 1990.

His first job on leaving Edinburgh was as Research Officer at the British Film Institute in London where he worked between 1990 and 1995. This was followed by eight years in the School of English at the University of Exeter where he established and directed the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, a public museum and research collection including some 50,000 books and artefacts.

In February 2004 he moved to the University of Auckland in New Zealand as Professor of Film and Head of the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies, where he remained until arriving at York in January 2009.

Departmental roles

At York he played a key role in devising and developing the BSc in Film and Television Production and in teaching modules on all levels of the programme. He also held a number of key administrative roles including Director of Graduate Studies (2009-13), Director of Research (2011-14) and Deputy Head of Department (2014-2017). He became Head of Department in January 2018.