The Iraq War, the Cold War, 1940s horror movies and ‘girl next door’ Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff – these disparate topics all feature in a series of public lectures this autumn being organised by our Department of History of Art and Film.

The lecture series kicks off on Monday 24 October with Dr Tamar Jeffers MacDonald, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent whose lecture is entitled ‘From “the most everything girl in Hollywood” to “the forty year old virgin”: Doris Day and Hollywood stardom’. Dr MacDonald is something of an expert on the singer/actress, having published several papers on her work and with a book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom due out next year from IB Tauris.

Subsequent lectures, every Monday through to 21 November, cover:

• 'Independence' and constraint: Elia Kazan, Hollywood and the Cold War
• Monsters, gangsters and spies: Star images, epistemological crisis and the 1940s horror cycle
• In country: Mapping the Iraq war in Iraq in Fragments (2006) and The Hurt Locker (2008)
• Hollywood re-mixed: Joseph Cornell, The Perils of Pauline and recycled film footage

All lectures start at 5.30pm and take place in the Ken Edwards Building. Most of them are in Lecture Theatre 3 but the Doris Day talk on 24 October is in Lecture Theatre 1.*

All these lectures are free and open to the public.

*This is really important. If you go in Lecture Theatre 3 at that time on that date you’ll hear a very different talk on ‘A Young Girl’s Flight from the Holocaust’.