Dr. Daniel Yacavone
Senior Lecturer in Film Studies (currently on research leave)

- Film Studies
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
- Tel: +44 (0)131 650 3636
- Email: D.Yacavone@ed.ac.uk
- Web: Edinburgh Research Explorer profile
Address
- Street
-
Room 4.02
50 George Square - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9LH
Background
Ph.D. University of Edinburgh (Film Studies); M.A. University of York (Philosophy); B.A. Connecticut College/Amherst College
Dr. Daniel Yacavone is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Film Studies within the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, where he has been Director of the Film Studies Programme. Currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Free University Berlin, he has been a Fellow-in-residence at The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Amsterdam (where he will be returning in Autumn 2022). He has also held a British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
His teaching and research interests encompass film aesthetics; film theory (including cognitive, semiotic, affective, and phenomenological approaches); European and North American cinema; the philosophy of film; intermediality; reflexivity; aesthetics and the philosophy of art (continental and analytic); film and other arts (particulalry painting); genre hybridity and revision; science fiction.
He is the author of Film Worlds: A Philopshical Aesthetics of Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2015). Shortlisted for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Monograph award. To date reviewed in: The Los Angeles Review of Books; New Review of Film and Television Studies; The British Journal of Aesthetics; Critique: revue générale des publications françaises et étrangères; Senses of Cinema; Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish daily newspaper); Cinemas: Revue d'Études Cinematographiques; Film-Philosophy (w. response); Contemporary Aesthetics (publication of interest).
Dr. Yacavone has published in The New Review of Film and Television Studies; New Literary History (NLH); Film-Philosophy; Studies in French Cinema; and MSMI (Music, Sound and the Moving Image), among other journals.
He is currently writing a book - Reflexive Cinema: Rethinking Self-Awareness, Affect and Intermediality in the Moving Image - under contract with Oxford Univeristy Press, which reassesses the concept and practice of reflexivity in light of contemporary film and media theory.
Dr. Yacavone is on the editorial board of Brill/Rodopi's Contemporary Cinema book series, was a member of Edinburgh University Press's faculty committee for five years, and has acted as a peer reviewer for numerous publishers, journals, and research councils and institutes (e.g., The Irish Research Council, The British Academy, The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research)
Undergraduate teaching
- Introduction to European cinema (2nd year)
- Film Criticism and Analysis (4th year)
- French 1B (Introduction to Film Analysis) (1st year)
- Film Theory (LLC Summer School) (2nd year)
Postgraduate teaching
- Film Theory and criticism 1 & 2 (Core course, MSc [MA] in Film Studies)
- Film and other Arts (‘Impure Cinema’) (MSc [MA] in Film Studies)
- Film Adaptation (MSc [MA] in Film Studies)
- Cinema Auteurs (MSc [MA] in Film Studies)
- Film-Philosophy (MSc [MA] in Film Studies)
- Cinema: Time, Space, Memory (MSc [MA] in Film Studies)
- French Cinema (MSc [MA] in Film Studies)
- British Cinema (MSc [MA] in Film Studies)
- Research Skills and Methods in Film Studies
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Research summary
- Classical, modern and contemporary film theory
- History of film theory and criticism
- Philosophy and film
- Cinema and aesthetics/philosophy of art (continental and analytic)
- Modern and contemporary European and North American cinema (inlcuding the work of Lynch, Rivette, Roeg, Welles, Resnais, Kubrick, von Trier, Greenaway, Kieslowski, and Godard, among other filmmakers)
- Reflexivity in film and art
- Cinema and painting
- Science-fiction and European ‘art’ cinema
- Intermediality
-
Recursive reflections: Types, modes, and forms of cinematic reflexivity
(29 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190095345.003.0005
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published) -
Doubled visions: Reflexivity, intermediality and co-creation in the five obstructions and the mystery of Picasso
(29 pages)
In:
New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 18, pp. 452-479
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2020.1814621
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
The expressive sign: Semiotics, enunciation, and screen art
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published) -
Impersonal enunciation, or the place of film
In:
New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 16, pp. 85-89
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2018.1413738
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Book/Film/Article review (E-pub ahead of print) -
Response to review of film worlds: A philosophical aesthetics of cinema by Swagato Chakravorty
(4 pages)
In:
Film-Philosophy, vol. 21, pp. 156-160
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2017.0040
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Book/Film/Article review (E-pub ahead of print) -
Film and the phenomenology of art: Reappraising Merleau-Ponty on cinema as form, medium, and expression
In:
New Literary History, vol. 47, pp. 159-185
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2016.0001
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema
(344 pages)
Research output: › Book (Published) -
Spaces, Gaps and Levels: From the Diegetic to the Aesthetic in Film Theory
(16 pages)
In:
Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, vol. 6, pp. 21-37
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Film Worlds: Zur Neukonzeption von filmischer Repräsentation, Temporalität und Reflexivität
(11 pages)
In:
Rabbit Eye: Zeitschrift fur Filmforschung, vol. 1, pp. 109-120
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Towards a Theory of Film Worlds
(25 pages)
In:
Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, pp. 83-108
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)