Dr Fincina Hopgood
Lecturer in Screen Studies - Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education; School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Phone: +61 2 6773 5660
Email: fhopgood@une.edu.au
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.
