Dr Julia Havas
Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Co-Chair of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Profile

Biography

I earned my Master’s degrees in German Studies (2006), Film Studies (2008), and Teaching and Education (2008) at ELTE University, Budapest. I completed my PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2017, funded by UEA’s PG Research Studentship Scheme. My thesis investigated the discursive interplay between cultural value, feminist politics, and genre in the post-millennial American “feminist quality TV” phenomenon, and was published as a monograph in 2022 by Wayne State University Press. Upon completion of my doctoral studies, I joined De Montfort University as Lecturer in Media and Communication (2018-2022), before joining the University of York as Lecturer in Film and Television in September 2022.

Research

Overview

My research primarily focuses on issues of representation on TV in relation to genre, narrational conventions, cultural value, and production contexts. I have published single-authored and collaborative essays on topics such as contemporary women's comedy in television; Netflix’s binge-able programming strategy and its effects on serialised narration in relation to representations of sexual violence; and contemporary dramedy television’s relationship to genre, femininity, race, and cringe aesthetics.

My current preoccupation is with the transnational relationship between Eastern European and Anglophone media, using de-westernizing and decolonial methods to highlight the ways these are predicated upon power relations of gender, race, and nation among other identity constructions. I have published extensively on British and American screen media's use of Eastern Europeanness and on the Eastern European region's gendered media histories in a range of journals and edited collections.

Publications

Full publications list

Monograph

Havas, Julia. 2022. Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television. Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Journal articles

Havas, Júlia & Mártonfi, Anna. 2025. ‘Artistic genius’: Celebrity Auteur-directors after #MeToo between Hollywood and Central Eastern Europe. Celebrity Studies, 16(4), 545–560. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2025.2575683

Havas, Julia, Anna Mártonfi, & Gábor Gergely. 2021. Beasts from the East: Fantasies of Eastern Europeanness in Brexit-era BBC Drama. VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture, 10 (20): 48–63. http://doi.org/10.18146/view.265

Havas, Julia. 2021. “Socialist Superwomanhood and Policing the Nation in the Hungarian TV Series Linda”. Published electronically June 14. MAI: Feminism and Popular Culture, no. 7.

             https://maifeminism.com/socialist-superwomanhood-policing-the-nation-in-linda/

Havas, Julia and Anna Mártonfi. 2019. “Bedrock Behind the Iron Curtain: Transcultural Shifts in the Hungarian Dubbed Version of The Flintstones (1960-66).” Published electronically July 24. Animation Studies.

https://journal.animationstudies.org/anna-martonfi-julia-havas-bedrock-behind-the-iron-curtain-transcultural-shifts-in-the-hungarian-dubbed-version-of-the-flintstones-1960-66/

Havas, Julia, and Maria Sulimma. 2018. “Through the Gaps of My Fingers: Genre, Femininity, and Cringe Aesthetics in Dramedy Television.” Television & New Media 21 (1): 75–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418777838.

Havas, Julia. 2011. “Test-tanok. Kortárs magyar szerzői filmek nőképe.” [Body Issues. Gender Politics in Contemporary Hungarian Auteur Cinema] Metropolis Quarterly on Film Theory and History, no. 3: 30–41.

Havas, Julia. 2010. “A magyar romantikus vígjáték a 2000-es években.” [The Hungarian Romantic Comedy of the 2000s] Metropolis Quarterly on Film Theory and History, no. 1: 66–78.

Havas, Julia. 2008. “Női sorozatok: kettő plusz kettő. Kortárs amerikai tévésorozatok nőképe.” [Two Plus Two. Representations of Women in Contemporary American Television Series] Metropolis Quarterly on Film Theory and History, no. 4: 54–79.

Book chapters

Havas, Júlia. Forthcoming 2026. The body politic/The body national. Constructions of nation and gendered violence in Hungarian popular discourses. In: The Routledge Companion to Gender, Violence and Popular Culture, edited by Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge, 25-26. London and New York: Routledge.

Havas, Julia. 2021. “‘Dream on Princess’: Cultural Value, Gender Politics, and the Hungarian Film Canon through the Documentary Szépleányok (Pretty Girls, 1987).” In: Routledge Companion to European Cinema, edited by Gábor Gergely and Susan Hayward, 96–108. New York: Routledge.

Havas, Julia and Tanya Horeck. 2021. “Netflix Feminism: Binge-watching Rape Culture in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Unbelievable”. In: Binge-watching and Contemporary Television Research, edited by Mareike Jenner, 250-73. Edinburgh University Press.

Havas, Julia. 2017. “Tina Fey: ‘Quality’ Comedy and the Body of the Female Comedy Author.” In: Hysterical! Women in American Comedy, edited by Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant, 347–78. Austin: University of Texas Press.