Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for BA (Hons) Film and Media
I am a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies. I am proud to be a graduate of the University of Sunderland (BA Media/MA Media and Culture). My doctoral research was funded by AHRC as part of a project called 'Televising History' which was based at University of Lincoln and directed by Professor Ann Gray and Dr Erin Bell.
I have worked as a lecturer since 2005 and hold a PGCE PCET teaching degree. I have taught at both University of Lincoln and University of Sunderland.
My research is focused on Identities, Place and Institutions and the complex relationships between these concepts. This often leads to investigations of production or working cultures/practices and consumption cultures in specific locations – this sometimes includes media environments. There is a historical approach to some of the research and often an examination of textual elements as well as data collection of oral histories.
Teaching and supervision
I am Programme Leader and Personal Tutor for BA (Hons) Film and Media. I am module leader for several core and optional modules which include:
- FDN018 Multimedia Communication
- MED152 Understanding Media and Culture
- MED123 Making of Popular Culture
- MED261 Researching Media in Theory and Practice
- MED359 Media and Society
Research interests for potential research students
- Cultural Constructions of Identity
- Participatory Cultures
- Representations of the past on screen
- Discourse Analysis
- Media History
- Media Production Studies
- Audience or Consumption Studies
I have supervised dissertations on a range of topics including representations of female heroes in film, constructions of 'place' and identity in Animal Crossing, the impact of social media on contemporary journalism, and an analysis of public response to Southpark.
I am supervising PhD research on gaming cultures, K-pop fan cultures, podcasting and female comedy on television.
Research
My PhD formed part of an AHRC-funded project 'Televising History'. My section of the research investigates ITV history from the regional perspective and the connections between place and identity. In the thesis I analyse ITV regional and national station identifiers and a regional television programme, The Way We Were, each of which was formatted differently for specific regions. The thesis includes a production study and audience reception study to examine how the programme was constructed by producers and then interpreted by audiences.
I have given several conference papers on my doctoral research. Other publications relate to representations of the medical profession in the period drama Poldark and the representations of gender in Poldark.
Publications
Article
Holdsworth, Amy and Sadler, Barbara (2010) Northern Views: A Report from the Northern Television Studies Research Group. Visual Culture in Britain, 11 (1). pp. 137-141. ISSN 1471-4787
Book Section
Sadler, Barbara (2024) 'The hospital is not your larder' : Representing the NHS in Being Human. In: The National Health Service of Television: The Picture of Health. Routledge, London, p. 211. (In Press)
Sadler, Barbara (2023) 'T'Ain't Right, T'Ain't Fair, T'Ain't Proper': Examining the Representations of Women in Poldark. In: Gender, Sexuality and the UN's SDGs. SpringerNature. (In Press)
Sadler, Barbara (2022) Avoiding ‘the faddlings of Dr Choake’: The professionalisation of medicine in Poldark? In: Diagnosing History: Medicine in Telivision Period Drama. Manchester University Press, Manchester. ISBN 9781526163288
Conference or Workshop Item
Sadler, B (2021) Using Television logos and interstitials as historical source: Mapping the decline of regional ITV companies and the development of a national ITV channel in England 1978- 2005. In: Television Histories in Development Conference, 30 Sept-1 Oct 2021, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.
Sadler, Barbara (2021) ‘Pedagogical triage’ through the Media Reading Group? In: Digital Teaching and Learning Conference, 30 June 2021, University of Sunderland.
Sadler, Barbara (2021) The Bodies of Poldark: Time, Masculinity and Medicine. In: BAFTSS Annual Conference: Time and the Body in Film, Television and Screen Studies, 7-9 April 2021, Hosted by University of Southampton.
Sadler, Barbara (2019) ‘Where Drama Lives’: Using ITV logos and branding to identify change and struggle at ITV. In: IAMHIST Annual Conference: Power and the Media, 16-19 July 2019, University of Northumbria.
Sadler, Barbara (2013) The Way We Were: Producing and consuming regional identities. In: CRMCS Research Seminar Series, 10 June 2013, University of Sunderland.
- Production or working cultures
- Audience/consumption cultures
- Social constructions of identity
- Representations on screen