Professor Linda Ruth Williams

Linda Ruth Williams is Professor of Film at the University of Exeter, where she was Head of Film for five years. She has also worked at the University of Southampton and the University of Liverpool, held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Manchester, and gained her PhD from the University of Sussex.  

Her current research investigates women in the contemporary screen industries – primarily UK-based, but very much in an international context. As well as being one of the Co-Leads on the Women’s Screen Work in the Archives Made Visible project, she was also co-investigator on another significant AHRC-funded projects investigating creative labour for women and minorities in the UK screen industries: Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary Film Culture in the UK, 2000-2015 (2014-8). This project, on which Prof Shelley Cobb (also part of the Women’s Screen Work in the Archives Made Visible team) was PI, conducted 59 oral histories with women in 6 key above-the-line roles, and produced statistical reports evidencing inequalities in the current industry.  

She has recently held a Visiting Fellowship at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, where she researched two interconnected strands on women filmmakers and the material traces of creative work. One strand, part of a developing edited collection (with Phil Wickham, also part of the Women’s Screen Work in the Archives Made Visible team) provisionally titled Women’s Film History in Twelve Objects, investigates how physical artefacts help to excavate period and industry context, and have much to reveal about practitioners and roles. The second strand focuses on women writer-directors, considering processes and practices as screenwriters become directors and directors pen their own scripts. Linda has also used oral history across a number of projects, and is interested in this method being more firmly established within the toolkit of academic screen studies as well as curatorial and archive practice. With Shelley Cobb she is conducting new oral histories for the Women’s Screen Work project with filmmakers who are donating their life-work archives, considering wider questions of legacy, historical significance framed and denoted by archives and museums, and the evidential material traces of screen work.

Linda has written five monographs including the first book to define a new genre which emerged in the 1980s and 90s: The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (2005); she has also edited screen studies volumes including Contemporary American Cinema (2005, with Michael Hammond). Her wider research has focused on sexuality and censorship, and on wider questions within anglophone cinema, particularly from Britain and the U.S.A. since the 1960s. Her book on childhood and child actors in the films of Spielberg – Steven Spielberg’s Children – was published in August 2025 by Rutgers University Press.