Dr Fincina Hopgood

Lecturer in Screen Studies - Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education; School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Fincina Hopgood

Phone: +61 2 6773 5660

Email: fhopgood@une.edu.au

Twitter: @FincinaHopgood

Biography

Fincina joined UNE in 2016 as Lecturer in Screen Studies in the Media and Communications Program where she coordinates the units Australian Screens, Hollywood Cinema, and Human Right on Screen. She is also part of the teaching team for the units Screen Media, and Creative Industries and Communication. Fincina is an experienced, award-winning teacher of film, television and screen studies, having taught a wide range of subjects at undergraduate and graduate levels at Melbourne, Monash and RMIT Universities. Fincina began writing about cinema as a film reviewer and interviewer for the long-running industry magazine Cinema Papers, and she was the Book Reviews Editor and Australian Cinema Co-Editor for the esteemed online film journal Senses of Cinema (2005-2011).

Fincina completed her PhD in Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne on the topic of empathy and portrayals of mental illness in a selection of Australian and New Zealand films from the 1990s. She has continued her research in this area, expanding her field of study to include contemporary cinema (since 2000) and television, and convening the symposium Try Walking in My Shoes: Empathy and Portrayals of Mental Illness on Screen at the University of Melbourne supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Fincina has been a regular guest on ABC National and community radio programs, discussing portrayals of mental illness in film and television across a range of genres. She is currently writing a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan, which is the culmination of her research over the past decade: Moving Images of Mental Illness on Australian Screens: The Shift Towards Empathy.

Fincina’s research interests in the intersection of media and mental health have led to interdisciplinary collaborations with colleagues at the University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, and the University of New South Wales, developing community-engaged projects in partnership with mental health and arts organisations including SANE Australia, Mind Australia, Everymind, The Dax Centre, Art With Impact, and the National Film and Sound Archive. One of these projects Empathy and portrayals of mental illness in Australian visual culture received seed funding from the Melbourne Social Equity Institute and the Disability Research Initiative at the University of Melbourne and resulted in Fincina and her colleagues travelling to Berlin as guests of the German Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs to present this project at the annual Inklusionstage/Inclusion Days, an international conference dedicated to social inclusion and implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Fincina also holds an honorary appointment as Fellow in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, where she is collaborating with a team of researchers to investigate the potential of podcasts about mental health themes to reduce stigma. She is currently a member of the Public Stigma Technical Advisory Group, an 18-month appointment to inform the development of the National Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Strategy for the Federal Government’s National Mental Health Commission.

Qualifications

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Melbourne
Postgraduate Diploma in Cinema Studies, University of Melbourne
Bachelor of Arts (Honours in English) & Bachelor of Laws, University of Melbourne

Teaching Areas

Australian Film
Television Studies
Documentary
Adaptation
Media Studies
Human Rights on Screen

Research Interests

Mental illness portrayals in film and television
Contemporary Australian cinema
Empathy and social change
Mental health in the media
Human rights filmmaking and film festivals

Recent Grants

2015-16: Interdisciplinary seed funding for the project Empathy and Portrayals of Mental Illness in Australian Visual Culture, Melbourne Social Equity Institute and the Hallmark Disability Research Initiative, University of Melbourne

2015: Associate Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions

2014: Research Fellowship, AFI Research Collection, Australian Film Institute and RMIT University

2014: CHE/SCC Research Support Scheme for the symposium Try Walking in My Shoes: Empathy and Portrayals of Mental Illness, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

Publications

Book Chapters

‘Of Mothers and Madwomen: Mining the Emotional Terrain of Toni Collette’s Anti-Star Persona’, American-Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections, edited by Adrian Danks, Stephen Gaunson and Peter C. Kunze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 91-114.

‘The Laughter and the Tears: Comedy, Melodrama and the Shift Towards Empathy for Mental Illness on Screen’, Australian Screen in the 2000s, edited by Mark David Ryan and Ben Goldsmith, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2017, 165-190.

An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990)’, Making Film and Television Histories, edited by James Bennett and Rebecca Beirne, I.B. Tauris, London, 2011, 189-193.

Essays on Baz Luhrmann, Strictly Ballroom (1992), William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Australia (2008) in Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand, edited by Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand, Intellect, Bristol and Chicago, 2010, 52-65.

‘Caring about mental illness: the power of melodrama in contemporary Australian cinema’, Australia – Who Cares?, edited by David Callahan, Network Books, Perth, 2007, 253-270.

‘Before Big Brother there was Blair Witch: the selling of “reality”’, Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, edited by Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer, McFarland, Jefferson, 2006, 237-252.

Refereed Articles

‘Walking in Her Footsteps: Migration, Adaptation, and the Mother’s Journey in Romulus, My Father’. Adaptation 9.1 (2016): 22-34.  Special issue ‘Adapting Australia’ edited by Imelda Whelehan and Ken Gelder, 2016 (first published online March 2015).

‘Unravelling the Myth of the Mad Genius in An Angel at my Table’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, special issue ‘Screening the Past: Gender Readings in History and Film’ edited by James Bennett and Josephine May, 10 (2), January 2006, 53-76.

‘Melodramas of Affliction: portraits of madness on screen’, Credits Rolling! Selected Papers from the 12th Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand, edited by Marilyn Dooley, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, 2005, 159-171.

‘“A Special Kind of Excess”: the unruly woman of comedy and melodrama in Jane Campion’s Sweetie’, antiTHESIS, ‘Excess’, 15, 2005, 91-113.

Other publications

Fincina’s range of publications include book reviews for esteemed journals ScreenScreening the Past and Australasian Drama Studies, articles for The Age and The Conversation as well as reviews of Australian films and interviews with Australian filmmakers for Metro Magazine and Senses of Cinema.

Fincina’s interview with Fred Schepisi for Senses of Cinema was reprinted in the Conversations with Filmmakers series published by University Press of Mississippi: ‘Shooting dialogue as action: an interview with Fred Schepisi’, Fred Schepisi: Interviews, edited by Tom Ryan, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2017.

Memberships

Associate Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
Affiliated Researcher, Disability Research Initiative, University of Melbourne
Affiliated Researcher, Human Rights and Animal Ethics Research Network
Member, Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aeotearoa New Zealand

Related Links

Seed Funded Project, Empathy and Portrayals of Mental Illness in Australian Visual Culture, Disability Research Initiative, University of Melbourne

Associate Investigator Profile, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions

Affiliated Researcher Disability Research Initiative, University of Melbourne

Human Rights and Animal Ethics Research Network

https://www.historyofemotions.org.au/about-the-centre/researchers/fincina-hopgood/

https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/602-fincina-hopgood

https://rune.une.edu.au/web/cris/rp/rp14572