Jules O’Dwyer is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media with the Cambridge School of Creative Industries. His research focuses on film theory, gender and sexuality, contemporary thought, with a particular focus on questions of space, place, and identity, as well as French, Francophone and European cinemas.
Jules joined Anglia Ruskin University following a teaching post in Film Studies and a Junior Research Fellowship in Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge, where he also gained his PhD in 2021. He is the author of two books, The Seduction of Space: Cruising French Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) and Hotels (Fordham University Press, 2025), and his work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in journals such as Screen, Discourse, Yale French Studies, and several edited collections.
He currently serves as a journal editor and conference organiser for world picture and regularly hosts podcast interviews for the New Books Network.
Jules currently teaches on the following modules:
Langue de Bois: The Queer Bois de Boulogne Proust to Tersen,” Yale French Studies 147 (Special Issue on “Strange Landscapes”, eds. Hannah Freed-Thall and Jill Jarvis, forthcoming 2026)
“Le Lieu de drague comme lieu de mémoire; Or, Cruising, Cinema, and Colonial Vestiges” in Queer Realms of Memory: Marginal Sexualities and Identities in the French National Narrative, eds. Siham Bouamer, Denis M. Provencher, and Ryan Schroth (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025): 252-263.
“Hotel Film and the Erotics of Adjacency,” World Picture 15 (Winter 2024): 81-100
“From the Story of the Eye to Corporeal Cinema,” in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect. ed. Todd W. Reeser (New York: Routledge, 2022): 237-246
“Coming and going: Nolot, Barthes, and the Porn Theater,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 42: 3 (Fall 2021): 259-280
“Enduring Extremity: On Isabelle Huppert’s Intertextual Body,” in Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship. ed. Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021): 79-98
“Reframing the spaces of French cinema,” Studies in French Cinema 19:2 (2019): 165-169
“The cinematic Rorschach: Deciphering signs and stains in Michaux and Brakhage,” in Stains | Les Taches: Communication and Contamination in French Culture. ed. Zoe Angelis and Blake Gutt (Bern: Lang, 2019): 69-84
“Histoire(s) de l’art: the queer curation of Vincent Dieutre,” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 16 (Winter 2018): 53-66
“Reorienting objects in Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s Les Statues meurent aussi,” Screen 58: 4 (Winter 2017): 497-507
2025. “Cinéfiliation, transtextual ambivalence, and paternal returns in Marcello Mio,” 33rd Screen Studies Conference, University of Glasgow, UK
2025. with Geoffrey Maguire, “If These Walls Could Talk: Motel Destino’s erotic thresholds,” A Symposium on the Work of Karim Aïnouz, Cambridge, UK
2025. “The Seduction of Space in French Cinema and Thought,” Film and Screen Research Seminar, University of Cambridge
2024. “Hotel Labour in the Service of the Cinematic Image,” British Academy of Film and Screen Studies conference, University of Sussex, UK
2024. “Cinephilia, Screen Love, Queer Intimacy,” Thinking about Art: Philosophical Approaches to Art History, National Gallery, London & KCL
2023. “Queer ecologies from Bergman to Bergsmark,” Scandinavian Film Wandering: Nordic Film Art Seminar, Beijing Normal University & Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, China
2023. “Claire Denis’s Paris,” Modern French Research Seminar, Cambridge, UK
2023. “Quartiers chauds: spatial and sexual politics in Homme au Bain,” The Work of Christophe Honoré: A Symposium, Cambridge, UK
2023. “I Can’t Sleep, or, Nocturnal Ruminations on Cinema’s Hotels,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Denver, USA
2023. “The Hotel as Narrative Scaffold,” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Chicago, USA
2022. “Notes on Surplus, Subtraction, and Seduction in Queer Cinema,” World Picture conference, Colorado College, USA
2022. “Archives, afterlives and the Queer 1950s: The case of François Reichenbach,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, USA