Professor Kevin Rockett

Dr Kevin Rockett is a Fellow Emeritus (2004) and former Professor in Film Studies in the School of Creative Arts, Trinity College Dublin, where he was Head of School during 2006-09. A former Chairman of the Irish Film Institute (1984 - 91), he taught film studies at the National College of Art and Design and University College Dublin before moving to Trinity College in 2000. Among his responsibilities as Head of School was the strategic development of the newly-formed (2006) School of Drama, Film and Music, now the School of Creative Arts. He also was responsible for film policy development during 2010-12, and was the School's Director of Research. He was involved in the introduction of Film Studies as a Two Subject Moderatorship degree subject, the first specialist undergraduate film studies degree in the Republic of Ireland, and which began in 2003, and had its first cohort of graduates in 2007, and helped plan the introduction of the M. Phil in Film Theory and History, which was introduced in 2006/07. He was also director of the Trinity College-based Irish Film & TV Research Online, 1896-2006 (www.tcd.ie/Irishfilm), a major research tool for such research, which has documented 40,000 Irish film and television productions. The website also includes the Irish Research Council-funded 'Irish film censors records, 1923-38' (2008-10); and 'Irish Silent Films', a series of fiction films made in Ireland during 1910-15, released on the site in 2011. A specialist in all areas of Irish film history and of the representations of the Irish in world cinema, his D.Phil from the University of Ulster was entitled 'Cinema in Ireland: A Study of Production, Distribution, Exhibition and Censorship' (1989). He is author, co-author, or editor of thirteen books, including 'Cinema and Ireland' (1987), 'Neil Jordan: Exploring Boundaries' (2003), the award-winning 'Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography' (2004), and, in 2011 (with co-author Emer Rockett), 'Magic lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture Shows in Ireland, 1786-1909' and 'Film Exhibition and Distribution in Ireland, 1909-2010'. 'Cinema and Ireland' was the first book to offer a fully contextualised and (almost) exhaustive history of Irish cinema and its representations. A germinal text, republished by Routledge in 2017, it has been referred to by subsequent film researchers as 'the pioneering work' or as 'seminal'. In recognition of its value to Irish diaspora studies Prof. Rockett's 'The Irish Filmography: Fiction Films 1896 - 1996' was launched by President Mary Robinson, while film-maker Bob Quinn described it as 'An extraordinary opus ... Rockett is an excellent and painstaking scholar. Never before has anybody attempted to document in one volume every film ever made in or about Ireland. ... The amount of detail he has unearthed is no less than stupendous. ... The nearest literary analogy I can think of is Dineen's Irish Dictionary.' 'Irish Film Censorship', which was the focus of much media interest and debate, was described as 'magisterial' (Hugh Linehan, 'Irish Times'), 'monumental' (RTE Radio 1), 'meticulous' (Luke Gibbons, 'Irish Times'), and 'fascinating' (Kim Bielenberg, Irish Independent). He was the initiator in 2003 of the Irish Postgraduate Film Research Seminar in association with the University of Ulster, Coleraine, which was was the recipient of significant funding from the Higher Education Authority under the North South Programme for Collaborative Research. As part of this support, four volumes of the proceedings of the Seminar were published in volumes co-edited by Prof. Rockett. Since retirement in 2016, Dr. Rockett has been researching the one-name family history of the Rochelle/Rokele/Rockett surname in Ireland from the thirteenth century onwards.

  Architecture   Cinema/Video   Cultural History   Digital Television   Journalism   Literary Criticism   Media Arts   One name history   Photography   Radio   Television   Theatre/Film Criticism   Twentieth Century History   Visual Arts

Irish film in all its aspects: its history, representations, and national film production policy, as well as the cinemas of the Irish diaspora. Other research interests include pre-cinema visual culture, especially the histories of the magic lantern and the panorama. Medieval and early modern history have emerged as major interests as part of the research into the one-name history of the surname Rochelle/Rokele/Rockett.