Dr Nick Jones
Reader in Film, Television and Digital Culture

Profile

Biography

I joined the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at York as a Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture in 2017. I research digital effects, popular cinema, and interactive media, and have published multiple books and articles on these subjects (see Research tab for more info). I teach on a range of modules on the Film and Television Production BSc and Interactive Media BSc, and I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, completing a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice in 2017.

Research

Overview

My research concerns digital effects, popular cinema, spatial theory, and interactive media. My PhD explored the representation of space in the contemporary Hollywood action sequence, and was published as Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory in 2015 by Routledge. From 2015 to 2018 I undertook a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship titled Contemporary 3D Cinema: Space in the Digital Age. This work explored 3D cinema in the twenty-first century, considering in particular its links with wider visual media and technological developments, as well as its highly distinctive aesthetics. The project resulted in numerous articles and the book Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D and Visual Culture, published by Columbia in 2020 and nominated for Best Monograph by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.

In 2023 I published Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (Edinburgh), a monograph exploring the influence of the GUI computer screen upon a range of other media, and a range of articles and book chapters exploring digital media, ethics, and labour (also nominated for Best Monograph by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies). In 2026 I edited the collection Unspool: Critical Time Loops in Screen Media (Edinburgh), the first book-length study of the time loop format across film, television, videogames, and more.

I welcome applications for MRes and PhD supervision across any of these and related topics.

External activities

Memberships

I release occasional video essays which are available via YouTube.

I was the producer and co-founder of Look/Think Films with Ben Woodiwiss from 2010-2018, an independent London-based film production company. Our first feature, Benny Loves Killing (2012) received many favourable reviews and won several awards at international film festivals, including Best Horror at the Oregon Independent Film Festival.

Publications

Selected publications

Unspool: Critical Time Loops in Screen Media (Edinburgh, 2026)

‘When That Light Hits the LED Sky: Selling Virtual Production in The Batman (2022) Beyond,’ Convergence (2026): 1-16, doi.org/10.1177/13548565261455753

‘if {Cat/s}, Smiths, R&lph, Lola²}{Embodying the Glitch();}’ in Radical Embodiment on Film: Time and the Cinematic Body, eds. Louis Bayman and Davina Quinlivan (New York: Bloomsbury, 2026): 161-176

Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (Edinburgh, 2023)

'Far From Houdini: The "Magic" of the VFX Breakdown' Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 18.1 (2023): 42-58

Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D and Visual Culture (Columbia University Press, 2020)

‘Visual Productions of Urban Space: Lefebvre, the City and Cinema’ in The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, the City and Urban Society, eds. Michael Leary-Ohwin and John P McCarthy (New York: Routledge, 2020)

‘The Perpetual Motion Aesthetic of Action Cinema’ in A Companion to the Action Film, ed. James Kendrick (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), 99–117

‘This is My World: Spatial Representation in the Resident Evil Films’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 30:4 (2016): 477-488

Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory (London: Routledge, 2015)