Dr. Belén Vidal

Belén Vidal  is a Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London, UK. She writes and teaches courses on history and memory in film, and on the biopic as a screen genre.

She is the co-editor (with Tom Brown) of The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture (2014) and the author of Figuring the Past. Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (2012) and Heritage Film. Nation, Genre and Representation (2012); recent scholarly papers include “The Barbara Hypothesis: Performance and Spectatorship in the Musical Biopic” (French Screen Studies, 2023) and “New Women’s Biopics” (European Journal of Life Writing, 2021). As a part of the Science in Pop Culture section’s programme Dr. Vidal will give a talk introducing the genre of biopics and its conventions