Dr Saige Walton

Saige Walton is a Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies and one of the Associate Directors of the Creative People, Products and Places (CP3) research centre, based in UniSA Creative.  She also serves as a Research Degree Coordinator.

She is a film and visual culture studies scholar who works in American, European and World Cinema contexts. She is particularly interested in issues relating to screen aesthetics and the body, often using phenomenological philosophy as well as other film-philosophical frameworks to make 'sense' of the cinema. She also teaches and conducts research in areas relating to popular film genres, horror, experimental film/media, art and inter-mediality.

Saige's first scholarly monograph - Cinema's Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement - was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2016 (reviewed in Film-Philosophy; reviewed in Screening the Past; reviewed in Alphaville).  In this book, she explores the parallels between philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's thought, film-phenomenology and the baroque, establishing the baroque as its own distinct cinema of the senses.  You can access a PDF of the Introduction here: Cinema's Baroque Flesh.

Building on her interest in film and the body, she has edited two special journal issues relating to these topics: "Materialising Absence in Film and Media" (with Nadine Boljkovac), published in Screening the Past (Issue 43 2018) and a special issue of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media on "Screening the Artist" (co-edited with Lucio Crispino) which featured a number of leading international film/media and film-philosophy scholars (Issue 23 2022).  You can read the Introduction and access the entire issue here: "Screening the Artist" Alphaville Special Issue.

Saige's second monograph in process explores the embodiment and ethics of a contemporary cinema of poetry.  Publications arising from Saige's work on film and the poetic have appeared in leading international film and critical theory journals such as Film-Philosophy, Paragraph and Projections. 

Saige serves as peer reviewer for a wide range of journals and publication houses such as Bloosmbury Publishing, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Third Text, Film-Philosophy, French Screen Studies, the New Review of Film and Television Studies, Senses of Cinema and Screening the Past, among others.  She is a member of the International Advisory Board for Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media.

Prior to joining the University of South Australia in 2012, Saige taught screen, media and cultural studies subjects at the University of Melbourne, Australia.  She is also a former Assistant Curator of Exhibitions with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne who has helped to curate a number of film programs, exhibitions, screen and art related events for the general public.  In 2023, she collaborated with the Adelaide Film Festival to deliver the "Screen Conversations" series of talks with Australian filmmakers.

• Creative People, Products and Places (CP3) research centre
• European Network of Film and Media Studies (NECS)
• Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy (ASCP)
• Visiting Research Fellow - Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London (January - April 2014)

Qualifications

• Doctorate of Philosophy Melbourne University

• Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Melbourne University