Dr Tanya Horeck

Tanya Horeck is a Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies and Research Lead/Director for the Cambridge School of Creative Industries. Her research focuses on gender-based violence and ways to challenge it. Her areas of expertise include: digital cultures of communication; true crime; binge-watching and television culture in the streaming era; #MeToo, consent culture, and feminist hashtag activism; women filmmakers; intimacy coordination and care in the media industries; technology-facilitated sexual and gender-based violence; affect, internet memes, and the attention economy.

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Background

Tanya has researched representations of gender and sexual violence in the media for over 20 years now. More recently, she has led empirically grounded research into the topic of young people and technology-facilitated gender-based violence. This collaborative research is the subject of a forthcoming co-authored book (with Professor Jessica Ringrose, Professor Kaitlynn Mendes, and Betsy Milne), Postdigital Teens: Gender, Violence, and Networked Lives (Oxford University Press). This book project emerges out of two AHRC grants, one on the online harms facing young people during Covid-19 and the second a follow-on funding intervention that has produced workshops to equip young people with digital defence skills to help them stay safe online.

Tanya was also recently the Principal Investigator on a British Academy Small Grant for the project, “The Role of the Intimacy Coordinator: New Depictions of Sex and Consent in UK Television Culture.” In collaboration with Susan Berridge (University of Stirling) this project explores the relatively new role of the intimacy coordinator which emerged in the wake of the #MeToo and #Timesup movements. Through a mixed methods approach consisting of textual analysis and interviews with intimacy coordinators (and those they collaborate with), this project advances an understanding of intimacy coordinators as innovating depictions of intimacy, revealing the 'circuits of care' that run either side of the screen.

Tanya was the author of an impact case study for REF 2021, and a founding member of the Sexual Violence Researchers’ Group (SVRG) at ARU.

Research interests

• Technology-facilitated sexual and gender-based violence
• Feminism and hashtag activism
• True crime
• #MeToo documentaries
• Contemporary TV
• Rape culture
• Consent culture
• Intimacy coordination
• Sex and gender on contemporary TV
• Women filmmakers

Areas of research supervision

• Contemporary popular cinema and television
• Celebrity culture
• Technology-facilitated gender-based violence
• Digital culture and social media
• Hashtag activism
• Women filmmakers
• Documentary film and theory
• True crime
• Affect theory
• Feminism and feminist media studies
• The intersectionality of gender, class, race and sexuality in popular culture

Tanya has supervised a wide range of PhDs to completion, beginning with Claire Henry’s “Rape-Revenge Revisions: Case Studies in the Contemporary Film Genre” in 2012. She also has extensive experience examining PhDs from around the world.

Teaching

Tanya currently teaches on the following modules:

• Documentary Film Theory
• Classical Hollywood Cinema
• Theorizing Spectatorship
• Digital Media Theory: Social Media, AI, and the Cultures of the Internet
• The Cultural Politics of Celebrity
• Contemporary Television
• Gender and Popular Cinema

Qualifications

• DPhil, University of Sussex, 2000
• MA, Carleton University, 1995
• BA, Carleton University, 1992

Memberships, editorial boards

• Member of Society of Cinema & Media Studies
• Member of British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS)
• On the editorial board of Television & New Media and MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture

Research grants, consultancy, knowledge exchange

2021-2022: UKRI/AHRC Combatting gendered, sexual risks and harms online during Covid-19: Developing resources for young people, parents, and schools (Co-I with PI Kaitlynn Mendes, University of Leicester and Jessica Ringrose, University College London)

2020-2022: AHRC Follow on Funding for Impact and Engagement, Digital Defence & Activism Lessons: Equipping young people to navigate contemporary digital cultures in and around school (Collaborator with Co-I Professor Jessica Ringrose and PI Professor Kaitlynn Mendes University of Leicester)

2021-2023: British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant, The Role of the Intimacy Coordinator: New Depictions of Sex and Consent in UK Television Culture (PI, with Susan Berridge, University of Stirling as Co-I)

2021-2023: Collaborator on SSHRC Insight Development Grant (with Lisa Coulthard, University of British Columbia and Lindsay Steenberg, Oxford Brookes), Digital Dark Tourism

2017: Harry Ransom Fellowship

Selected recent publications

Books and edited collections

Horeck, T, Meyers, E., Froula, A. and Lenos, M. Televising True Crime (edited collection, forthcoming 2024, Routledge).

Horeck, T., Mendes, K. and Ringrose, J. Postdigital Teens: Gender, Violence, and Networked Lives, (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2024).

Horeck, T. The Cinema of Sarah Polley: Adaptation, Collaboration, Desire (with Edinburgh University Press, Visionaries: The Work of Women Filmmakers series, forthcoming 2024).

Horeck, T. 2019. Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era (monograph). Wayne State University Press.

Horeck T., B. Åström and K. Gregersdotter, eds. 2013. Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond. London/NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Horeck, T. and T. Kendall. 2011. The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

Horeck, T. 2004. Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (monograph). London/New York: Routledge.

Recent Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Ringrose, J., Milne, B., Horeck, T and Mendes, K. 2023. #MeToo in British Schools: Young People’s Changing Understandings of Sexual Violence during the COVID-19 Pandemic, submitted to European Journal of Cultural Studies

Horeck, T and Paasonen, S. 2022. ‘Natalie Wood Day’: Sexual Violence and Celebrity, Remembrance in the #MeToo Era, Celebrity Studies

Horeck, T. 2022. Too Good For This World: Keanu Reeves, God of the Internet. In Special Issue on Keanu Reeves, Celebrity Studies, 13:2, 143-158

Horeck, T. 2021. Netflix and Heal: The Shifting Meanings of Binge-Watching During the COVID-19 Crisis. Film Quarterly, 75 (1): 35–40.

Horeck, T. 2021. Better Worlds: Queer Pedagogy and Utopia in Sex Education and Schitt’s Creek. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media

Horeck, T and Negra D. 2021. Reconsidering Television True Crime and Gendered Authority in Allen v. Farrow. Commentary & Criticism, Feminist Media Studies. (2021)

Recent presentations and conferences

2023. “True Crime TikTok: On Ethics and Algorithms”, BAFTSS panel on true crime (with Simon Hobbs and Megan Hoffman).

2023. BAFTSS Roundtable for annual conference: “Cultures of Care: Changing Media Practice” (with Leshu Torchin, Susan Berridge, Shweta Ghosh, and Mette Hjort)

2023. “COVID Choreography: Redefining Care and Consent on Set,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies panel in Denver: Television, Care, and the Production of Intimacy (with Professors Helen Wood, Helen Wheatley and Michele Aaron)

2023. “Sex and Safety: Exploring Mainstream Media Coverage of Intimacy Coordination,” Doing Women’s Film and TV History conference, Brighton, UK, 14-16 June (with Susan Berridge)

2023. “Nicola Bulley and the TikTok Detectives: Missing White Woman Syndrome in the Social Media Era,” Trial by Media Workshop, University of Leicester, 30 June (with Deborah Jermyn)

2023. “#MeToo Film and TV: Feminism, Resistance, and Social Change,” roundtable on ‘Between Posthumanism and Post-Feminism: Beyond the Gaze’, Wilfrid Laurier, 14 February

2023. “Nicola Bulley and the TikTok Detectives: Missing White Woman Syndrome in the Social Media Era”, symposium, ‘Trial by Media,’ Leicester University, 30 June

2023. “Postdigital Teens: Gender, Violence, and Networked Lives,” Gender-Based Violence Conference, Anglia Ruskin University, 21 June

2022. Respondent on Panel, “Stay Sexy and Don’t Get COVID”, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, online

2022. “@everyone’s invited: #MeToo in British Schools, Young People, and Changing Understandings of Sexual Harassment at School and Online,” International Communication Association Conference, Paris

2022. “Consent, Intimacy Coordination and Contemporary TV,” Consent Symposium, Birkbeck University, London, 17 June

2022. Chair of Panel, “Sex, Consent and Intimacy in Contemporary Media Cultures,” and delivered paper, “Intimacy Coordination: Staging Sex and Consent in UK Television Drama” (with Susan Berridge), Console-ing Passions, Florida, online

2022. “Reframing Intimacy in the Era of Internet TV and Intimacy Coordination,” Postdigital Intimacies Symposium, Coventry University, 23 & 24November

2022. “TV Togetherness and Binge-Watching During the Pandemic,” The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) 2 February

2022. “Contemporary TV and the Art of Intimacy Coordination,” Lancaster University, 17 March

2022. Plenary session at BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies) on “Care, Consent, and Collaboration: Intimacy Coordination and the Re-imagination of Sex and Intimacy” (with Susan Berridge and Adelaide Waldrop)

2022. “The School Response to Online Harassment and Abuse,” Invited Talk at the National Association for Pastoral Care in Education (NAPCE) annual conference (with Kaitlynn Mendes)

2021. Collaborator/Co-participant (with Ruby Rich, Neta Alexander, Kartik Nair and Tina Kendall) in Film Quarterly webinar Reconsidering Binge-watching in the Age of COVID-19. This event emerged out of our collaboration on a special section of Film Quarterly on ‘Rethinking Binge-watching in the Age of COVID-19’

2021. “carolebaskinkilledherhusband: The politics of Tiger King memes.” Carleton University, Canada, 25 February

2021. “The Art of Making Safe Spaces: The Rise of Intimacy Coordination,” University of Portsmouth, Faculty Seminar, 19 November

2021. “Intimacy Coordination and UK Television Culture,” Oxford Brookes University, 11 November

2021.“Combatting Online Sexual Harassment – Why we need RSE More Than Ever,” Invited Talk at the National Association for Pastoral Care in Education (NAPCE) annual conference (with Kaitlynn Mendes)

Media experience

Tanya regularly does media interviews and writes for The Conversation. Recent media work includes:

Cited in Vanity Fair article, “Idaho Murders: As a Small Town Grapples With Sinister Rumors, Media’s True-Crime Obsession Grows,” 8 March 2023

BBC Points of View, ‘Steeltown Murders,’ 4 June 2023 

BBC Radio Scotland, Mornings with Kaye Adams, interview on ‘Do dramatizations of real life crime make us forget the victims?’ 15 June 2022

Pandemic & Beyond Podcast, #MeToo in British Schools: Young people’s changing understandings of sexual violence after the Covid 19 lockdowns, May 2022, Episode 20, ‘Sexual and Gendered Risks’

The New York Times, interviewed for article, '‘Minx’ Reveals that not all nudity is created equal’, 17 March, 2022

Radio news breakfast interview, Cambridge 105, Festival of Ideas, True Crime, 9 October 9 2019

Cited in BBC article, “Bella Thorne: Whoopi Goldberg's naked photo comments 'disgusting',” June 19, 

Participated in documentary that draws on her research on image-based abuse: ‘Love, lies and nudes’ (2018)