Professor Sally Faulkner
Professor Sally Faulkner studied French and Spanish at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and then completed the MPhil in European Literature, and a PhD in Spanish, both at Cambridge.
She was appointed to a Lectureship in Spanish at the University of Exeter in 2001 and became, in 2015, the first woman to hold a personal chair in the language there. At Exeter she was Modern Languages Director of Research and Head of Department, Humanities Associate Dean in International and Development, and University Assistant Deputy Vice Chancellor for Europe; she also founded the research Centre for Translating Cultures, co-established the teaching and research project Subtitling World Cinema, and launched the lectures series Languages in a Global World.
Professor Faulkner has served on the Arts and Humanities Research Council Modern Languages Steering Group, and Peer Review College, and the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland Executive Committee; she currently co-edits Legenda’s Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures.
In 2024 Professor Faulkner returned to Cambridge following her election to the 1933 Professorship in Spanish and joined the fellowship of Peterhouse.
Professor Faulkner’s research focuses principally on Spanish cinema, with significant interests also in Spanish television, European (especially Portuguese) film, and Latin American cinema. Her most recent monograph, The Cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé: Feminism and Francoism (2024), the first monograph in English on this brilliant, yet forgotten, director, and current research project, ‘Leading Women’ (see below), focus on gender and feminism. Previously she has worked on politics and production histories, the subject of A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s (updated and expanded in the 2022 Spanish translation). Questions of cultural value, for example in films adapted from literature, underpin her first book, Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (2004), as well as A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910-2010 (2013), her one-hundred-year history of the national cinema, and Middlebrow Cinema (editor, 2016). Her research therefore turns around the question of what is included, and what is excluded, and why, in national and transnational film and television histories.
Professor Faulkner currently leads, as Principal Investigator, a five-year international research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Invisibles e insumisas / Invisíveis e insubmissas: Leading Women in Portuguese and Spanish Cinema and Television, 1970-1980. Working with a team of two Co-Investigators and three post-doctoral research associates, the project questions the primacy of the focus on the film director-auteur in audio-visual histories, and recovers, through archive work and interviews, the creative leadership of women in the period, especially their work in less visible, ‘below-the-line’ roles in film, and in television more widely.
In addition to her current grant, Professor Faulkner was previously awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship in 2011 to write A History of Spanish Film and develop her work on the middlebrow. In 2013, she won the Philip Leverhulme Prize for distinction in the field of Modern Languages and Literatures. She has been Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and Visiting Professor in Media Studies, Carlos III University, Madrid.
Professor Faulkner shares her work with wide audiences by collaborating with film festivals, independent cinemas, and institutions (especially Filmoteca Española and the Instituto Cervantes). She has a particular interest in sharing previously inaccessible films in Spanish with wider Anglophone audiences through subtitling into English. Her first project, El mundo sigue / Life Goes On (Fernán Gómez 1963) is available to stream here, and a blog post about the subtitling and screening of Bartolomé’s ¡Vámonos, Bárbara! / Bárbara, Let’s Go! (1978), is available here.
Leading Women in Spanish Cinema and Television, 1970-1980, co-authored with Nuria Triana-Toribio, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, contracted, 2025.
The Cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé: Feminism and Francoism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024.
Middlebrow Cinema, editor, London: Routledge, 2016. (Full text available Open Access.)
'Portuguese Film: Colony; Postcolony; Memory', co-edited with Mariana Liz, Journal of Romance Studies, 16, 2, 2016.
A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society, 1910-2010, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013; Spanish translation, Madrid-Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2017.
‘Memory and Exile in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Spanish Culture,’ co-edited with Derek Flitter, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 17, 1, 2011.
A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006; revised and expanded Spanish translation, Un cine contradictorio: ocho filmes españoles de la década de 1960, Madrid-Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2022.
Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema, Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer-Tamesis, 2004, revised Spanish translation, Adaptaciones literarias en el cine y la televisión españoles. Historia, espacio, género, Madrid-Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2023.
