Erica Horton

Erica Horton joined NUA to teach film theory and history in 2016 having graduated with her PhD in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia that year. While she teaches subjects across film studies disciplines, her research specialism is in British television comedy and the study of creativity from a British cultural studies perspective, with additional interests in Hollywood film comedy and the shifting landscape of exhibition and broadcast in the digital age.

I am excited to establish my research further as I develop my early career researcher status alongside my teaching across the Film and Moving Image Production undergraduate degree programme. My fascination with both the mechanics of comedy and its ever-shifting cultural status has been a lifelong hobby and to study and contribute to the literature on these subjects drives my current research interests. The relational and often conflicting para-discourses around the value of comedy programmes, film and other forms and how specific comedy texts hold differing cultural statuses on either side of the Atlantic is of particular interest, not least due to my own transatlantic status as a British-American and my own experiences of dueling sets of values. It is with this perspective on the coexisting of conflicting sets of meanings that I pursue specific sites of meaning production in popular culture.

Research and Practice

• 2020: Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry – a book published through Routlege of the findings of the Make Me Laugh research project, to which my PhD was attached. The principle researcher was Brett Mills and I provided additional writing on comedy and television history.
• 2015: Transition, crisis and nostalgia: Youth masculinity and postfeminism in contemporary Hollywood, an analysis of Superbad – a journal article for the Boyhood Studies Journal and then republished in 2021 as a chapter published by Berghahn Books under title Cinemas of Boyhood: Masculinity, Sexuality, Nationality Ed. Timothy Shary

Other Activities

• 2021: PAL Mentor Coordinator for NUA Faculty of Arts and Media
• 2020 – present, NUA Change Working Group
• 2019 – present, NUA Research Committee
• 2018 – present, NUA Equality Diversity and Inclusion Committee
• 2015-2019 International Day of the Girl Norwich – funded events committee organising educational and empowering games and workshops for young people of all ages to address gender