Clara Bradbury-Rance is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Liberal Arts at King's College London. She holds a BA in Film Studies (University of Exeter), an MRes in Sexuality and Gender Studies (University of Exeter) and a PhD in Screen Studies (University of Manchester). Before joining King’s in 2017, she taught at various UK universities across the fields of film, media, literature, gender, and cultural studies. 

Research Interests 

Clara has published widely on LGBTQ+ film and media, including essays on queer masculinity; Netflix and queer taste; citational practice; cinephilia; the sex scene; and the work of filmmakers such as Dee Rees, Lisa Cholodenko, Maryam Keshavarz, Lisa Aschan and Desiree Akhavan. She is the author of Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, which was published by Edinburgh University Press and translated into Spanish by Osífragos (both 2019). The book’s key arguments are introduced and discussed in an interview with Clara for Lamda Literary.

Clara’s academic writing has appeared in the journals Camera Obscura, French Screen Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Feminist Pedagogy, Feminist Theory, MAI, New Review of Film and Television Studies and Film Quarterly. She is also a regular contributor to Sight and Sound magazine.

Clara is currently working on two new book projects: a semi-autobiographical account of spectatorship, masculinity and contemporary lesbian and trans screen cultures, and a BFI Classic on Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Teaching

Clara teaches across the BA Liberal Arts and MA Global Cultures programmes at King’s. She convenes the module Writing Liberal Arts, which focuses on the theme of Writing Bodies. Her third-year module Queer and Trans Screen Cultures is open to students from across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. With Ros Murray, she facilitates an interdisciplinary PhD work-in-progress group for Queer@King’s, which is open to PhD students across the college working on queer and trans studies. In 2023, Clara was awarded senior fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. 

Expertise and Public Engagement

Clara has collaborated with the following UK organisations: British Film Institute, Rio Cinema, London Feminist Film Festival, BFI Flare, ParaPride, POUTfest, Screen 25, Arrow Films, StudioCanal, Barbican, Club des Femmes, Curzon Soho, LGBT Foundation, Queer Contact Festival and HOME. International collaborations include the China Women's Film Festival, MIC Género (Mexico), and the Cineteca Nacional (Mexico).

Clara has been invited to speak at the Universities of Warwick, St Andrews, Essex, LSE, Stirling, UCL, Queen Mary and Westminster (UK); USC, Michigan and Mount Holyoke (USA); Leuphana (Germany); Gothenburg (Sweden); Monash (Australia); Le Mans and Sciences Po (France); and the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and the Facultad de Cine (Mexico). In February-March 2023, Clara was a visiting fellow at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Sydney. In April 2024, Clara was a public scholar-in-residence at the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. Clara has been on the board of the research centre Queer@King's since 2017.

Clara’s latest academic publications are listed below. For a full list of publications, including film reviews, please click here.