Melissa Oliver-Powell

Profile

Biography

Melissa Oliver-Powell joined the department in 2021, and is now a Senior Lecturer in Film and Literature. She is a comparative film scholar with a background in modern languages and a passionate focus on intersectional feminist and queer theories.

Melissa received her PhD in film studies from UCL in 2018 and lectured in film and television at the University of Exeter before joining the department at York. Her research specialises in British, French and Francophone cinema from the 1960s to the contemporary. 

She is particularly interested in examining films and film movements within their socio-political contexts, principally focusing on how art cinema and radical film movements have engaged with questions of motherhood, reproduction and reproductive rights. Her first monograph, Pepsi and the Pill: Motherhood, Politics and Film in Britain and France, 1958-1969, was published with Berghahn Books in 2022. She is also the co-editor of two collections, Representing Reproduction in Contemporary Literature and Visual Culture: Time, Crisis, Futurity, with Alice Hall, and ReFocus: The Films of Agnès Varda, with Natasha Farrell.

Alongside her work in film studies, Melissa is also a creative writer of prose fiction. In 2026, she was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize: Discoveries. Her first novel, Sea Mouth, is a literary reimagining of the myth of the sea monster Scylla as a contemporary feminist body horror and will be published as a lead debut title with Virago in 2028.

Research

Overview

Melissa’s research takes a particular interest in collisions between representations of motherhood and reproduction and moments of political rupture in world cinema. She focuses mainly on British, French and Francophone film, with specialisms in the British and French New Waves. Her work has appeared in leading international journals including Feminist Studies, Modern and Contemporary France, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Journal of British Cinema and Television and French Screen Studies. She has also contributed chapters to several edited collections, including The Bloomsbury Handbook to Chantal Akerman, The De Gruyter Handbook of Abortion Politics in Global Perspective, Male Icons and Identity in 1960s Britain, Abortion in International Popular Culture and The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature.

Melissa’s first monograph, Pepsi and the Pill: Motherhood, Politics and Film in Britain and France, 1958-1969, was published with Berghahn books in 2022. The book seeks to refine popular understandings of film and politics in 1960s Europe to show how the reimagination of motherhood and the relationship of women to the private and ‘national’ family were crucially at stake throughout the era’s major political questions. It focuses in detail on a number of areas, including consumerism and mass-production, abortion and reproductive rights, neo-colonial racism and migration, and sexuality and queer kinship structures. Melissa also co-convenes a Centre for Modern Studies research strand on representations of reproduction in literary and visual culture.

Melissa is the co-editor of two collections, Representing Reproduction in Contemporary Literature and Visual Culture: Time, Crisis, Futurity, with Alice Hall, and ReFocus: The Films of Agnès Varda, with Natasha Farrell.

Alongside her work in film studies, Melissa is also a creative writer, and is interested in prose fiction that explores questions of gender and sexuality, as well as retellings of myth and folklore. In 2026, she was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize: Discoveries. Her first novel, Sea Mouth, is a literary reimagining of the myth of the sea monster Scylla as a contemporary feminist body horror and will be published as a lead debut title with Virago in 2028. Melissa is currently working on a second literary horror novel, also contracted with Virago.

Supervision

Melissa welcomes enquiries from prospective research students in any of her research and practice areas across either film studies or creative writing. In film studies, she is especially interested in supervising projects on European film; queer screen cultures; representations of motherhood, family and kinship; film, politics and protest; film theory and aesthetics; and intersectional feminist theory and representation. In creative writing, she welcomes enquiries about prose fiction projects, especially those prioritising queer and feminist approaches.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Melissa teaches across the undergraduate programmes in English and Related Literature. As her specialist modules, she convenes and teaches a second year World Literature Module, European Cinema, and a third year Advanced Option Module, Smash the Screen: Cinemas of Protest.

Postgraduate

Melissa teaches across several core Modern and Contemporary postgraduate modules in film, literature and creative writing. Her specialist MA module is Auteures: Gender, Power and Authorship in Film and Literature.